DailyTech - IBM, HP Sit Atop Supercomputer List

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IT IBM, HP Sit Atop Supercomputer List
Marcus Yam (Blog) - June 28, 2007 9:00 AM

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7 comment(s) - last by IndyJaws.. on Jun 28 at 5:37 PM

IBM has the fastest supercomputer, but HP has the most

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:

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

All of the top eight supercomputers reside in the United States.

Intel Itanium2 shrunk to 11 representations in the Top 100; Xeon took 26 honors. AMD Opteron-hybrid clusters were featured in the number two and number three fastest supercomputers.

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interesting

By Proteusza on 6/28/2007 9:39:16 AM , Rating: 3

Interesting to see that Tomshardware.com has well and truly been bought and paid for. Their story sings the praises of Intel for "dominating" the list, while Dailytech chooses to focus on who assembled the computers more than what powers them.

What powers them is arguably important, but Intel does not power the most powerful supercomputers, they only power the majority. Also, they power 289 of the supercomputers, compared to 105 for AMD. Comparing the relative sizes of the two companies, one may be tempted to say that AMD does well considering it has the slower CPU's and far less resources.

/rant, alas a great website is gone.

RE: interesting

By Daven on 6/28/07, Rating: -1

RE: interesting

By KristopherKubicki

(blog) on 6/28/2007 12:26:40 PM , Rating: 3

The summer refresh of the Top 500 is the major release; the winter one is the minor. We didn't report on the winter refresh out of malice -- we're just busy guys.

If you're attempting to claim DailyTech has some bias in favor of Intel and high performance computing, I suggest you read some of our other op-eds on the subject:
http://dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7338

I'm not sure why you bring up the case of Windows, as there has not been a respectable HPC solution based on Windows... ever?

The "top 5" mistake was a misprint, and has been corrected.

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RE: interesting

By Ringold on 6/28/2007 4:19:16 PM , Rating: 3

The main bias I've ever seen from you guys is total ignoring the NDA's and reporting embargo dates most other sites seem to get stuck with. Keep up the good work!!

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bzzzt

By xprojected on 6/28/2007 10:07:14 AM , Rating: 2

As noted by IDG, the top five supercomputer systems in the latest survey, their manufacturer, the number of processors and the user are as follows:

Oops, that's the list from June 2006 ( http://www.top500.org/lists/2006/06 ). Someone might want to let IDG News Service know about that.

Meanwhile, the June 2007 top five looks something like this ( http://www.top500.org/lists/2007/06 ):

1. DOE/NNSA/LLNL, BlueGene/L - IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution
2. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Jaguar - Cray XT4/XT3
3. NNSA/Sandia National Laboratories, Red Storm - Sandia/ Cray Red Storm, Opteron 2.4 GHz dual core
4. IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, BGW - IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution
5. Stony Brook/BNL, New York Center for Computional Sciences, New York Blue - IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution

RE: bzzzt

By spillai on 6/28/2007 11:46:19 AM , Rating: 2

Supercomputer Manufacturers look very seriously on Power consumption and Cooling.Intel is way ahed of AMD in that areas?

Satheesh
www.knowledgevibes.com

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