New top 500 supercomputer list tips up

The list, which comes out twice a year and ranks the world’s largest supercomputers, was released at the International Supercomputing conference today.

According to the list, 74.8 percent of the world’s supercomputers (some 374 systems) use Intel processors, a rise of 4 percent in six months. This represents the biggest slice of the supercomputer cake for the firm ever.

Intel's Harpertown and Clovertown quad-core chips also showed signs of having the fastest growth rate in the same period, going from 102 to 252 systems.

IBM also had reason to pat itself on the back, not only for smashing through the petaflops barrier with its Roadrunner system, but also for the fact its Power processors surpassed AMD’s Opteron family in this latest list.

Apparently 13.6 percent (68 systems) of supercomputers use IBM’s Power chips, up seven systems from six months ago. AMD’s Opteron chips only tipped up in 56 systems (11.2 percent), which is down significantly from 78 systems six months ago.

Still, it wasn’t all doom and gloom for AMD as the company boasted in a press release that its technology plays a role in the world’s number one.

A newcomer to the list shot straight in to number 16; Japan’s T2K Open Supercomputer System, which also ranks as the number one Supercomputer in Japan.

The big in Japan 952 node Hitachi T2K, which sits at the University of Tokyo, apparently features Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and TYAN four socket server platforms.

Apparently, the powerful machine can reach a theoretical peak of about 140 TFlops, which, in case you’re wondering, is a lot of flops by anyone’s standards.

The Specs for the T2K were developed collaboratively by boffins from the University of Tsukuba, the University of Kyoto, and the University of Tokyo.

Japan’s sumo supercomputer boasts cutting edge AMD CoolCore Technology and Independent Dynamic Core Technology, both of which are thought to up energy-efficiency by getting more performance per watt.

The machine’s four Quad Core AMD Opteron processors, bunged into each node of the T2K, are also believed to give the whale-sized Supercomputer better scalability and advanced floating point processing capabilities.

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