Intel Corporation's platforms, whose influence in supercomputing has been gaining ground rapidly in recent years, laid claim to 286 sites in the "TOP500" list of supercomputer sites released by the University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Three years ago Intel had only three systems on the list. Intel Itanium processors are the foundation for the second-ranked new "Thunder" system at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) near San Francisco and also the fastest "cluster" computer. The system took only five months to build and deploy.

Intel-based systems now hold four of the top ten spots on the list. In addition to the LLNL system, Intel processors powers systems at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications - fifth place on the TOP500, which is based on 2,500 Intel Xeon processors; Institute of Physical and Chemical Res. - seventh place, which uses 2,048 Intel Itanium 2 processors; and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory - ninth place, which employs 1,936 Intel Itanium 2 processors.

"Intel architecture's rapid rise in supercomputing reflects the acceptance of the benefits of Intel's standards-based building-block approach with its benefits of reduced design time and cost effectiveness versus the proprietary methods", stated Abhi Talwalker, Intel vice president and general manager, Enterprise Platforms Group. "Using off-the-shelf components, supercomputers that used to take years to build can now be constructed in a matter of months with Intel Itanium or Xeon processors at a fraction of the cost. It's a trend that hasn't been missed by the industry as supercomputing, once the sole province of well-funded scientific pursuits, is now within the realm of a wide variety of disciplines."

Intel Itanium 2 processors have seen strong adoption in supercomputers this past year, more than tripling from 19 systems in June 2003 to 61 in the current TOP500 report. Intel Xeon processors also showed healthy growth from 100 systems a year ago to 225 in the same period.

Intel has two server architectures, which makes up approximately 85 percent of the server market segment share. The Itanium 2 processor family is targeted at business critical enterprise servers and technical computing clusters while the Intel Xeon processor family is broadly used for general purpose IT infrastructure.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's supercomputer, codenamed Thunder, took over the number two spot on the TOP500 in the new report. Configured with 4,096 Intel Itanium 2 processors, the Thunder supercomputer is world's most powerful cluster system. It is capable of 19.94 teraflops of performance. Thunder helps support LLNL's national security and science programmes in fields such as inertial confinement fusion, materials science, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, atmospheric science, biology and seismology.