Latest Supercomputer Ranking: Entering the Petaflop Era

TOP500.org has today released its 31st global supercomputer statistical report, officially declaring the transition of this industry from the TFlops era into the PFlops (quadrillions of operations per second).

The top spot in the latest rankings is occupied by IBM's Roadrunner, which was completed just earlier this month. It is housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under the U.S. Department of Energy and features a combination of IBM PowerXCell 3.2GHz and AMD Opteron DC 1.8GHz processors. The system boasts 122,400 computing cores with a peak performance of 1.026 PFlops and a theoretical maximum performance of 1.37578 PFlops, consuming 2,345.5 kilowatts of power.

IBM's BlueGene/L, located at the Lawrence National Laboratory under the U.S. Department of Energy, had reigned supreme for eight consecutive times since November 2004. This time around, it finally cedes its throne, with its performance of 478.2 TFlops now being less than half that of the Roadrunner. Another IBM system, the BlueGene/P, climbs from fifth to third place with a performance of 450.3 TFlops and is installed at the Argonne National Laboratory under the U.S. Department of Energy. Thus, all three top positions are crafted by IBM and owned by U.S. national laboratories. Moreover, the systems ranked sixth and ninth are also BlueGene/P models.

In fourth and fifth places respectively are the Sun Ranger "SunBlade" x6420 and the Cray "Jaguar" XT4, both newcomers. They utilize AMD's recently launched quad-core Barcelona Opteron processors, featuring 62,976 and 30,976 cores respectively, delivering performances of 326 TFlops and 205 TFlops.

Other key points summarized: