http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071113/full/news.2007.239.html
 Germany's JUGENE is the fastest civilian supercomputer in the world.Forschungszentrum Jülich | A computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California has once again been hailed as the world’s fastest computer. But five of the top ten spots in the TOP500 — a coveted list of the world's fastest supercomputers — were claimed by new systems.
The LLNL supercomputer, which uses an improved version of IBM's BlueGene/L system, now computes at 478.2 teraflops per second (1 teraflop is 1 trillion calculations), nearly three times as fast the second-place finisher, a supercomputer at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany that clocks in at 167.3 teraflops and won’t officially be open for business until early next year. |
The large number of newcomers is unusual, says Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who is one of the four experts who compile the biannual list. "This list had more changes at the top than most previous lists," he says.
On the rise
The LLNL supercomputer is owned by the US government and used for nuclear-weapons research. But more and more scientists not involved in defence-related research are seeing the potential benefits of “supercomputer time”, says Dongarra. “There is enormous desire from scientists,” he says. He adds that that he thinks increasing numbers of supercomputers will be built for non-defence research.
Number two on the list, which uses IBM’s new BlueGene/P technology and is dubbed JUGENE — will be rented out to scientists in all disciplines.
The list also highlights the expanding use of supercomputers by industry. Some 57% of the TOP500 supercomputers are owned by business, and that percentage will probably continue to edge higher, Dongarra says. “The trend is more and more into business and this trend will certainly continue,” he says. But, he adds, “supercomputers are important to defence and that is not going to go away.”
The fourth fastest computer is owned by Computational Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of Tata Sons in Pune, India. This supercomputer, a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system, computes at 117.9 teraflops per second.
Dongarra says that he had expected a supercomputer developed by Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, California, and installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, to take the top spot on the list, released on 12 November. But that computer is not yet up and running. Dongarra now expects that it will be on the next list, due out in June. Beyond that, he says that an IBM computer under development at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is expected to break the petaflot barrier (one thousand teraflops). “That probably will happen in 2009,” he says.