TOP500 Enlists World’s Fastest Computers
Top500, the Supercomputer Site, as its tagline goes, has just released the names of the top 10 fastest computers of the world. This new list differs from the site’s June 2008 release owing to several changes in the evaluation process. The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
The evaluation is done on the basis of the rate at which a computer can crunch numbers using floating point operations.
According to the list, the following are the top five supercomputers-
- At number 5 is China’s new gift to the world, Tianhe-1 (which etymologically means “River in Sky“
system. It has been installed at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin, China. The system is mainly used to Tianhe-1 sports a hybrid design with Intel Xeon processors(6144) and AMD GPUs(5120) used as accelerators. With 563 teraflops, it can transact more than 500 trillion operations per second. - The fourth slot has been occupied by Jugene at Julich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, with a computing power of 825.5 teraflops. It was no. 3 in the June list. It is an IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer and uses low- power chips. These 292000 chips makes it the fastest in England.
- Kraken, another upgraded Cray XT5 system at the National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee, claimed the No. 3 position with a performance of 832 teraflop/s (trillions of calculations per second).It sports 100,000 dual-core Opteron processors made by AMD, used typically in servers and mainly work-stations.
- Roadrunner, the world’s first petaflop/s supercomputer app in the June list has got the second run in the list this time. It has recorded a computing speed of 1.04 petaflops. And thus can make 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second.
- The world’s fastest computer is Jaguar, installed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, United States. It ran at a monstrous speed of 1.75 petaflop/s.
The list states that “U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 277 of the 500 systems (down from 291). The European share (153 systems – up from 145) is still substantially larger than the Asian share (50 systems –up from 49). In Europe, UK remains the No. 1 with 45 systems (44 six months ago). Germany and France share the No. 2 spot with 2 systems 27 systems each. Dominant countries in Asia are China with 21 systems (unchanged), Japan with 16 systems (up from 15), and India with 3 systems (down from 6). “
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