BlueGene/L supercomputer still most powerful computer

IBM’s BlueGene/L supercomputer, which is under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, has retained its leading place in the list of the most powerful machines on Earth. It has a processing peak of 136.8 teraflops, which will be doubled when construction is complete.

The Top 500 list is drawn up every six months. IBM’s BlueGene/L was placed first for the second time because its processing capacity doubled in size since the last list was drawn up.

When it is completed the BlueGene/L will use 65,536 processors to look at problems such as molecular dynamics, metrial modelling and turbulence and instability in hydrodynamics.

A BlueGene system was also in second place. It was recently installed in IBM’s Thomas J Watson Research Center in New York and has a processing peak of 91.2 teraflops.

IBM produced 51.8% of the machines on the Top 500 list, alongside manufactures such as Silicon Graphics, NEC, Hewlett-Packard and Cray.

Intel was the leading supplier of hardware, which was used in 333 of the systems listed.

Nasa’s Columbia supercomputer at the Ames Research Center in California was in third place.

The basic power requirement needed to be placed in the Top 500 list is 1.166 teraflops, compared with the basic 850.6 gigaflops needed to be included in the November 2004 list.

The Top 500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.