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IBM supercomputers at top of heap
BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT
25 June, 2005: IBM supercomputer is the best -- so says the world's top supercomputer ranking authority, TOP500. The IBM supercomputer Blue Gene/L leads the the list with a sustained performance of 136.8 Teraflops, or trillions of floating point calculations per second.
The system has been developed with the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, IBM's primary partner. it is installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in California and is expected to evolve into a 360 Teraflop Blue Gene/L supercomputer when the work is complete this year.
The second slot is also taken by IBM. Its IBM Watson Blue Gene system, currently at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center in New York, is No.2 with 91.29 TF as the planet's most powerful privately-owned supercomputer.
Said Dimitri Kusnezov, Director of the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing program: "The Blue Gene architecture will run certain problems at tremendous speeds, ten times faster than previously possible. Once complete, the National Nuclear Security Administration will have the kind of national security tool needed to rapidly analyze urgent nuclear weapons stockplie aging issues. It will support broader simulation codes to support certification of our stockpile."
Said Dona Crawford, associate director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: "even as we are bringing the IBM supercomputer to its full configuration, we are doing science critical to NNSA's mission to guarantee the safety, security and reliability of the US nuclear weapons stockpile. This represents a great team effort led by NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing program. Working with IBM, Los Alamos and Sandia, we are also advancing scientific discovery and the high-performance computing that makes it possible. The capabilities we are now beginning to apply to our national security missions will also be applicable in other domains."
IBM claims that this the first time in history that a single vendor, (IBM,) has more than 51% of the total number of systems on the list. IBM is the world's leading provider of both installed supercomputing systems with 259 systems as well as total aggregate supercomputing power, with a record total 976 Teraflops. IBM has six of the systems in the Top 10, including MareNostrum, Europe's most powerful supercomputer which is powered by IBM's POWER Microprocessor and eServer BladeCenter JS20 -- the only supercomputer based on blade server technology to ever be ranked in the global top 5.
As per the TOP500 List of Supercomputers, IBM is the indisputable leader in international supercomputing arena, with 57.9% of the total processing power, compared to next rival, HP which has 13.3%. Just IBM's Blue Gene TOP500 install base is equivalent to the total number of Cray systems and about 60% of all SGI systems on the list.
Since IBM announced the commercial availability of IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution, a commercial version of the research project, in November 2004, a record number of 16 Blue Gene Systems appear on the list. Based on IBM's Power architecture, the IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution is optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today's fastest systems. IBM and its partners are exploring a growing list of high performance computing (HPC) applications including life sciences, financial modeling, hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, astronomy and space research and climate modeling for eServer Blue Gene.
IBM is debuting two new Blue Gene systems on the TOP500 List: Boston University and Juelich -- each have installed IBM eServer Blue Gene systems.
BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT |
