The Cray XT5 supercomputer.
(Credit: Image courtesy of the National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)The Cray XT5 supercomputer known as "Jaguar" has finally clawed its way to the title of fastest computer in the world.
Sitting back at No. 2 on the Top500 list of supercomputers for more than a year, Jaguar overtook IBM's "Roadrunner" according to the twice-yearly list that will be unveiled Tuesday at the SC09 Conference in Portland, Ore.
Jaguar beat out the competition by showing it can process 1.75 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. IBM's Roadrunner was pushed back to No. 2 by posting a processing speed of 1.04 petaflop/s, a dip from the 1.105 petaflop/s it reached in a June 2009 test. The slower performance this time around is apparently due to a repartitioning of the system.
Every six months when the Top500 List is released the threshold to grab a place on it gets higher. The slowest supercomputer (No. 500) on November's list posted a speed of 20 teraflop/s, up from the 17.1 teraflop/s of six months ago. In other words, what is the slowest computer this time around would have been No. 336 in June.
Kraken, another Cray XT5 system, jumped up two places from its former No. 5 position by posting a processing performance speed of 832 teraflop/s. IBM's BlueGene/P, from Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany, came in at No. 4 with 825.5 teraflop/s. At No. 5 is China's Tianhe-1, the highest ranking ever for a Chinese supercomputer.
The top 10, while still dominated by supercomputers housed in the United States, had just one newcomer. That would be Sandia National Laboratories' "Red Sky," a Sun Blade system that posted a Linpack performance of 423 teraflop/s.
Just as the last time the list was released, the Top500 list is made up mostly of Hewlett-Packard and IBM computers. HP accounted for 210 of this year's 500, and IBM 185. In terms of processors in use, Intel still enjoys the lion's share, with 80 percent. The most popular operating system is Linux, with 90 percent of the Top500.
Here's the Top 10:
Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.75 petaflop/s)
Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1.04 petaflop/s)
Kraken XT5, Cray, National Institute for Computational Sciences (832 teraflop/s)
JUGENE, IBM, Forschungszentrum Juelich (825.5 teraflop/s)
Tianhe-1, NUDT, National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin (563.1 teraflop/s)
Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames Research Center (544.3 teraflop/s)
BlueGeneL, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (478.2 teraflop/s)
BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory (458.61 teraflop/s)
Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing Center (433.20 teraflop/s)
Red Sky, Sun, Sandia National Laboratories (423.9 teraflop/s)
For the full Top500 List head to the official site.
Correction, 10:38 a.m. PST: This story misidentified the maker of the Power processor. The maker is IBM.
Jaguar vs. Roadrunner. It could be a new Saturday morning cartoon, or a Hollywood franchise to replace an Alien vs. Predator series that surely must have run its course by now.
But no. It is instead a shorthand for the two fastest supercomputers in the world, as reported in the latest Top500 listing, released Monday in conjunction with the SC08 conference in Austin, Texas.
IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer
(Credit: IBM)First place went to Roadrunner, an IBM supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its performance in the running Top500's Linpack benchmark application was 1.105 petaflops per second. This was a repeat performance--Roadrunner also finished at the top of the heap in June's report on the biannual rankings, when it became the first supercomputer to cross the petaflop barrier. (A petaflop is a measure of calculations per second, with "peta-" meaning one thousand trillion of them.)
The blade servers in Roadrunner use a souped-up variation on the processor found in Sony's PlayStation 3, and the system's nodes are connected via a commodity Infiniband network.
At 1.059 petaflops, Jaguar wasn't far behind. That Cray XT5 supercomputer is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Supercomputing, as the name implies, involves complex equations and a lot of them. It's used to forecast the weather and suss out changes in climate, to foster research in nuclear power, and in locating underground oil reserves, and to help spacecraft get where they're going.
The Linpack benchmark isn't the be all and end all in toting up computing performance, but it does provide the researchers behind the Top500 listings with a fairly consistent way to test performance across disparate systems.
The Top500 results fluctuate from biannual report to biannual report, but the U.S. has long held sway in the supercomputing ranks.
(Credit: Top500.org)Third place went to an SGI Altix ICE system called Pleiades, based at NASA's Ames Research Center facility, that turned in 487 teraflops ("tera-" meaning a mere trillion). IBM's BlueGene/L finished fourth at 478.2 teraflops (it was second in June at that same performance level) and its BlueGene/P finished fifth, at 450.3 teraflops.
Nine of the top 10 supercomputers in the November rankings are located in the United States, and seven of those--including Roadrunner, Jaguar, BlueGene/L, and BlueGene/P--are at U.S. Department of Energy facilities. The odd computer out, at No. 10, is the Dawning 5000A, located at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center in China.
The U.S. is also the leader overall, with 291 of the 500 high-performance computer systems. Europe has 151 (England first, Germany second) and Asia has 47 (Japan first, China second).
Multicore processors have become the way of the world in supercomputing. A healthy majority of the top 500 uses quad-core processors (336), followed by dual-core chips (153). IBM's PS3 processor variants use nine cores.
Three-quarters of the top 500 (379 systems) use Intel processors, while about 12 percent each use IBM's Power (60 systems) or Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron (59 systems).
The top 10 list
• Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1.105 petaflops)
• Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.059 petaflops)
• Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames (487 teraflops)
• BlueGene/L, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (478.2 teraflops)
• BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory (450.3 teraflops)
• Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing Center (433.2 teraflops)
• Franklin, Cray, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (266.3 teraflops)
• unnamed, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (205 teraflops)
• Red Storm, Sandia/Cray, Sandia National Laboratories (204.2 teraflops)
• Dawning 5000A, Shanghai Supercomputer Center (results not specified)
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