The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well.1.TIANHE-1A, National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin, China
The Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin earned the top spot, achieving a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). Tianhe-1A is one of the 17 systems in the Top 500 that use NVIDIA GPUs (graphics processing units) to accelerate computation. China is also accelerating its move into high performance computing and now has 42 systems on the Top 500 list, moving past Japan, France, Germany and the UK to become the number two country behind the U.S., which has 275 of the top 500 supercomputers.
2.JAGUAR, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Jaguar has been knocked from the top spot it occupied in the June 2010 survey, ranking second with a 1.75 petaflop performance speed running the Linpack benchmark. Jaguar is a Cray XT5 system located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee. While Jaguar fell a few flops short this year, it retains a leadership position in supercomputing style with its striking Jaguar motif.
3.NEBULAE, China
Nebulae, which is located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China, achieved 1.271 PFlop/s to rank third overall, down one position from the June survey. Nebulae was built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU.
4.TSUBAME 2.0, GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Like the top-ranked Tianhe system, Tsubame 2.0 is a successor system that builds upon the design of a previously-ranked system. Tsubame 2.0 was developed by the Tokyo Institute of Technology in collaboration with NEC and HP, and is powered by more than 1,400 nodes using both HP Proliant servers and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. It is Japan’s highest-ranked supercomputer. Plans are being developed for Tsubame 3.0.
5.HOPPER, NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs
The top new U.S. entry in the latest Top 500 is Hopper, named for American computer scientist Grace Hopper, which will power science research at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Hopper is powered by the Cray XE6 system. A pioneer in the field of software development and programming languages, Hopper created the first compiler. The Hopper system clocked in at 1.05 petaflops.
6.TERA-100, CEA, France
Tera-100 is now Europe’s most powerful supercomputer. The system resides at the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA), where it supports the French nuclear weapons simulation program. era 100 consists of 4,300 bullx S Series servers, which were introduced by Bull in April 2010. It features 140,000 Intel Xeon 7500 processing cores, 300TB of central memory and a total storage capacity of over 20PB.
7.ROADRUNNER, Los Alamos National Laboratory
When the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos first appeared at the top of the June 2008 TOP500 list, it was the world’s first supercomputer to achieve a top performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (1015 floating point operations per second). It has now slipped to seventh place in the latest survey.
8.KRAKEN, National Institute for Computational Sciences
Kraken, an upgraded Cray XT5 system at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), claimed the No. 8 position with a performance of 831 teraflops. Kraken is used to enhance the efficiency of biofuels, develop more effective climate and weather modeling, and analyze disorders that throw the heart out of rhythm. The NICS is a partnership between the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Lab.
9.JUGENE, Juelich Supercomputing Centre, Germany
Clocking in at number nine is the Jugene supercomputer is housed at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre built on IBM BlueGene/p technology. With its 72,000 processors, Jugene is used for very compute-intensive simulations in materials science, environmental research and particle physics.
10.CIELO, Los Alamos National Labs
The new supercomputer named “Cielo,” the Spanish word for sky, will support all three national laboratories at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), including Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore. Cielo is the next generation capability class platform for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. We haven’t yet located images of Cielo, which was installed in third quarter of 2010, with additional capability planned for 2011 (if anyone at Los Alamos has images available, please contact us). Cielo’s architecture is based on Cray’s next generation “Baker” architecture with AMD’s new Magny-Cours processor, Cray’s “Gemini” high-speed interconnect and Compute Node Linux operating system.
The Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin earned the top spot, achieving a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). Tianhe-1A is one of the 17 systems in the Top 500 that use NVIDIA GPUs (graphics processing units) to accelerate computation. China is also accelerating its move into high performance computing and now has 42 systems on the Top 500 list, moving past Japan, France, Germany and the UK to become the number two country behind the U.S., which has 275 of the top 500 supercomputers.
2.JAGUAR, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Jaguar has been knocked from the top spot it occupied in the June 2010 survey, ranking second with a 1.75 petaflop performance speed running the Linpack benchmark. Jaguar is a Cray XT5 system located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee. While Jaguar fell a few flops short this year, it retains a leadership position in supercomputing style with its striking Jaguar motif.
3.NEBULAE, China
Nebulae, which is located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China, achieved 1.271 PFlop/s to rank third overall, down one position from the June survey. Nebulae was built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU.
4.TSUBAME 2.0, GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Like the top-ranked Tianhe system, Tsubame 2.0 is a successor system that builds upon the design of a previously-ranked system. Tsubame 2.0 was developed by the Tokyo Institute of Technology in collaboration with NEC and HP, and is powered by more than 1,400 nodes using both HP Proliant servers and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. It is Japan’s highest-ranked supercomputer. Plans are being developed for Tsubame 3.0.
5.HOPPER, NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs
The top new U.S. entry in the latest Top 500 is Hopper, named for American computer scientist Grace Hopper, which will power science research at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Hopper is powered by the Cray XE6 system. A pioneer in the field of software development and programming languages, Hopper created the first compiler. The Hopper system clocked in at 1.05 petaflops.
6.TERA-100, CEA, France
Tera-100 is now Europe’s most powerful supercomputer. The system resides at the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA), where it supports the French nuclear weapons simulation program. era 100 consists of 4,300 bullx S Series servers, which were introduced by Bull in April 2010. It features 140,000 Intel Xeon 7500 processing cores, 300TB of central memory and a total storage capacity of over 20PB.
7.ROADRUNNER, Los Alamos National Laboratory
When the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos first appeared at the top of the June 2008 TOP500 list, it was the world’s first supercomputer to achieve a top performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (1015 floating point operations per second). It has now slipped to seventh place in the latest survey.
8.KRAKEN, National Institute for Computational Sciences
Kraken, an upgraded Cray XT5 system at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), claimed the No. 8 position with a performance of 831 teraflops. Kraken is used to enhance the efficiency of biofuels, develop more effective climate and weather modeling, and analyze disorders that throw the heart out of rhythm. The NICS is a partnership between the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Lab.
9.JUGENE, Juelich Supercomputing Centre, Germany
Clocking in at number nine is the Jugene supercomputer is housed at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre built on IBM BlueGene/p technology. With its 72,000 processors, Jugene is used for very compute-intensive simulations in materials science, environmental research and particle physics.
10.CIELO, Los Alamos National Labs
The new supercomputer named “Cielo,” the Spanish word for sky, will support all three national laboratories at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), including Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore. Cielo is the next generation capability class platform for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. We haven’t yet located images of Cielo, which was installed in third quarter of 2010, with additional capability planned for 2011 (if anyone at Los Alamos has images available, please contact us). Cielo’s architecture is based on Cray’s next generation “Baker” architecture with AMD’s new Magny-Cours processor, Cray’s “Gemini” high-speed interconnect and Compute Node Linux operating system.