Top500 Madness

The latest Top500 list was unveiled on Friday.  For those who haven’t read the release, whoa nelly!  The list has always been a highly debated and contested flexing of one’s supercomputing might.  This list was no dissapointment.

The biggest story of this year was the backyard brawl between ORNL’s Cray XT5 system, Jagaur, and the reining champ, RoadRunner at LANL.  Fighters, to your corners!  It was widely publicized that Jaguar had a distinct chance to inch out the RoadRunner.  Alas, Wyle-E-Coyote never wins.  The folks at IBM/LANL did a quick upgrade in June in order to ensure their command.  It worked.  RoadRunner is #1, Jaguar #2.  Ladies and gentlefolk, we officially have two 1PF+ machines.

The number three system was no slouch either.  NASA Ames took #3 with Pleiades, an SGI Altix ICE system spinning at 487Tflops.  #4 and #5 are both BlueGene’s of various flavors located at LLNL and Argonne respectively.   TACC fell to #6 with Ranger, their massive Sun machine.  Cray took #7 and #8 with an XT5 at NERSC and an XT4 at ORNL.  Sandia/Cray took in #9 with new upgrades to the Red Storm machine.

All in all, we’ve seen some incredible performance jumps this year.  You now have to top 400Tflops in order to inch yourself into the top six.  Wow.

For more info on the latest Top500, read the full release here.

Comments

  1. Hiya,

    I know it’s not in the ultra-top-10 but it’s in the TOP500 and has an interesting architecture – how about some commentary on the Japanese Tesla machine? And perhaps the GPU Linpack implementation too?