Features

BlueGene/L System Number 1 in TOP500 List

By Sophia Mayengbam

The electronic computer since its first invention in the 1940s has made significant advancement. Computer has made possible many things which were just imaginations half a century back. Computer makers worldwide strive to bring the best in terms of speed and compatibility. The Top500 Supercomputer project started in 1993 provides a platform for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Held biannually, a list of 500 most powerful computer systems is assembled and released.

In the 2006 International Supercomputer Conference held in Dresden, Germany, only 83 machines were able to reach the TOP500 list. The number 1 position was claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

BlueGene/L also occupied the No. 1 position on the last three TOP500 lists. It has reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second) and still remains the only system ever to exceed the level of 100 TFlop/s. This system is expected to remain the No. 1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.

Three of the TOP10 systems on the November 2005 TOP500 list were displaced by newly installed systems. The largest system in Europe is the new No. 5 at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) in France. It is an Itanium based NovaScale 5160 system build by the French company Bull with 8704 processors and a Quadrics interconnect.

The largest system in Japan, a cluster integrated by NEC based on Sun Fire X64 with Opteron processors and an Infiniband interconnect, is installed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and gained the No. 7 spot.

The German Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) got to No. 8 with its new BlueGene system, which is now the second largest system in Europe. It is also the largest BlueGene system outside the US and the third largest in general.

The NEC-built Earth Simulator, which has a Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 TFlop/s and had held the No. 1 position for five consecutive TOP500 lists before being replaced by BlueGene/L in November of 2004, has slipped now to already No. 10.

IBM remains the dominant vendor of supercomputers with almost half of the list (48.6 percent) carrying its label. Also, four of the TOP10 systems are from IBM. Hewlett-Packard (HP) remains unchallenged at the second position in this survey with 30.8 percent of all systems.

Intel microprocessors are at the heart of 301 of all 500 systems. Intel’s EM64T-based processors are very successful in the high performance computing (HPC) market place, with 118 systems using them already. AMD’s Opteron processors are also steadily and rapidly gaining ground, now with 81 systems using them compared to only 25 systems one year ago.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 298 of the 500 systems installed there. The European share continues to decline with now 83 systems down from 100 six month ago, while Asia mounted a turn-around with now 93 systems up from 66 six month ago.


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