Jaguar is still top of the petaflops.
The latest list of supercomputers has kept the Jaguar on top.
The new list released at the end of last month placed the Jaguar machine at the top of its rankings, thanks to its 1.75 petaflop/sec performance speed running the Linpack benchmark.
Jaguar has a theoretical peak capability of 2.3 petaflop/sec, nearly a quarter of a million cores and is based at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge leadership computing facility.
Second on the list was a new entry, the Chinese Nebulae Supercomputer, which is built on a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. According to the list creators, Nebulae is the fastest computer on the list, and has a theoretical peak performance of 2.98 PFlop/s.
Nebulae's gain came at the expense of Roadrunner, which dropped down into third place with a performance of 1.04 petaflop/s.
European super computers make their first appearance in the list at number 5. There sits an IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer, which the list creators said achieved benchmarks on 825.5 teraflop/s.
Some notable highlights in the list include the fact that quad-core processors take 425 of all the 500 available spots, and processors with six cores or over can be found in 25 of the systems. Meanwhile 408, or just under 82 percent use Intel processors. By comparison, AMD Opteron chips, which were the second most commonly used, were found in only 47 systems and IBM Power chips are found in 42 from the list.
The US has the most super computers with 282 of the 500, while Europe, in second place accounts for 144. Australia, while on the list, is down near the bottom, with just one machine on the list.
In order to get on the list computers must hit at least 24.7 teraflop/s, a slight raise against the 20 teraflop/s required the last time the list was out, six months ago.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012