A whole lot of shaking going on in the TOP500 supercomputer listHeidelberg 20 jun 2002 A new number one in the world, the Japanese Earth Simulator, a new number one in Europe, the HP AlphaServer SC ES45/1 GHz at CEA in France, a new company with the most machines in the list (HP/Compaq). A lot has happened in the world of supercomputing since the last TOP500 list was released in November last year. This can be seen from the latest list of the world's moste powerful supercomputers, released this morning at ISC2002 in Heidelberg.
As we already did report, the new number onw, the Earth Simulator build has a record lead to the number two of a factor of almost 5 in Linpack performance. Probably it will take several years before a machine is constructed that can take over the lead. The Earth Simulator's performance equals the sum of the Linpack performance of the next 12 systems in the TOP500.
The Earth Simualtor is the only machine in Japan in the Top 10.
There are three more systems new in the top 10. At 4th position is the 4 Tflop/s HP AlphaServer at the CEA (Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique) in France.
On position eight is a 2.3 Tflop/s IBM Power4 system installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a 2 Tflop/s system currently tested at IBM Poughkeepsie for the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL).
There are almost 25 machines (23) in the world that exceed 1 Tflop/sof Linapck performance. To bein the list at position 500 it takes at least 134 Gflop/s. Just six months ago, that would have brought you half way the list at position 280, showing there are a lot of changes in the list.
More than 10% of the list now consists of cluster machines. The fastes is an AMD athlon based system at position 35, located at WR at the University of Heidelberg here in town. This machine has a performance of 825 Gflop/s). There are 6 more AMD based clusters and 41 Intel based clusters in the list. Fourteen clusters are self-made. The success of the clusters in the list lets one ask whether there is still a need for a separate top-clusters-list. This does not seem to be the case.
Hewlett-Packard is taking the lead as company with the most systems instaled from IBM with 168 compared to 164. If HP and Compaq had merged already six months ago, they would already have been number one at that time with 169 to 160 systems. With respect to performance, IBM is still in lead, however with 33%, compared to 22% for HP and 19% for NEC.
The list can be viewed on http://www.top500.org.
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