A list of the top 500 supercomputers of the world released during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany points to IBM as having the fastest supercomputer in the industry, and Hewlett-Packard being the largest provider of supercomputers.

IBM announced its second generation Blue Gene/P supercomputer earlier this week, but it wasn’t the petaflop-capable computer that helped Big Blue take the crown – it was the older Blue Gene/L, installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, that took the number one spot with a sustained performance of 280.6 teraflops.

In terms of market share, HP grew to 40.4 percent with 202 systems, while IBM was close behind with 192 systems, making up 38.4 percent. In terms of computing power, IBM’s systems hold a 42 percent share, dominating the fastest clusters on the list.  45 of the top 100 machines were of IBM manufacture.

Sun Microsystems held a 1.4 percent marketshare – something it hopes to grow with the help of the company’s new 2 petaflop-capable Constellation supercomputer system. At best, though, the Sun Constellation may capture speed records second to IBM’s 3 petaflop-capable Blue Gene/P.

The top eight supercomputer systems in the latest survey, their manufacturer, the number of processors and the user are as follows:

1. IBM, 131,072, U.S. Department of Energy-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2. Cray, 23,016, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
3. Cray, 26,544, NNSA/Sandia National Laboratories
   
4. IBM, 40,960, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
5. IBM, 36,864, Stony Brook/BNL
   
6. IBM, 12,208, DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
7. IBM, 32,768, Rensselaer, Polytechnic Institute
8. Dell, 9,600, NCSA