Fujitsu’s “K Computer” installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, is the new No.1 system on the TOP500. It took this position with an impressive Linpack performance of 8.162 petaflop/s, more than 3 times as much as the next largest system achieved. It achieved this performance using 548,352 SPARC64 processing cores, almost twice as many as any other system in the TOP500. And contrary to many other recent very large systems it does not utilize graphics processors or other accelerators. The K Computer is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the list.
The Chinese Tianhe-1A system enjoyed the No. 1 on the TOP500 only for a single edition last November and is now the No. 2 with 2.57 petaflop/s performance.
The largest U.S. system, Jaguar, installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, slipped to the No. 3 spot with 1.75 Pflop/s Linpack performance.
Roadrunner, the first system to break the petaflop barrier in June 2008, is now listed at No. 10.
There are 10 petaflop/s systems in the TOP10
The two Chinese systems at No.2 and No. 4 and the Japanese Tsubame 2.0 system at No. 5 are all using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation and a total of 17 systems on the list are using GPU technology.
The most powerful system in Europe is a Bull system at the French CEA at No. 9.
China keeps increasing its number of systems to 62 and is now clearly the No. 2 country, as a user of HPC, ahead of Germany, UK, Japan, and France.
Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (77.4 percent) of TOP500 systems. Intel’s Westmere processors increased their presence in the list strongly with 169 systems, compared with 56 in the last list.
Quad-core processors are used in 46.2 percent of the systems, while already 42.4 percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores.
The No.5 system Tsubame 2.0 can run a Windows OS and achieve almost identical performance doing so.
Cray defended the No. 2 spot in market share by total against Fujitsu, but IBM stays well ahead of either.
The Cray’s XT system series remains very popular for big research customers with three systems in the TOP10 (one new and two previously listed).
Fujitsu’s “K Computer” installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan is the new No.1 system on the TOP500. It took this position with an impressive Linpack performance of 8.162 petaflop/s, more than 3 times as much as the next largest system achieved. It achieved this performance using 548,352 SPARC64 processing cores, almost twice as many as any other system in the TOP500. And contrary to many other recent very large system it does not utilize graphics processors or other accelerators. The K Computer is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the list.
The Chinese Tianhe-1A system enjoyed the No. 1 on the TOP500 only for a single edition last November and is now the No. 2 with 2.57 petaflop/s performance.
The largest U.S. system, Jaguar, installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, slipped to the No. 3 spot with 1.75 Pflop/s Linpack performance.
Roadrunner, the first system to break the petaflop/s barrier in June 2008, is now listed at No. 10 and there are a total of 10 petaflop/s systems on the list.
Two more systems are new in the TOP10: at No. 6 “Cielo”, a Cray XE6 system at DOE’s Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, and at No. 7 the upgraded “Pleiades” system, an SGI Altix system at the NASA Ames Research Center.
There are 10 petaflop/s systems in the TOP10.
The U.S. is tops in petaflop/s with five systems performing at the petaflop/s level, Japan and China have each two and France has one.
The two Chinese systems at No. 2 and No. 4 and the Japanese Tsubame 2.0 system at No. 5 are all using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation and a total of 17 systems on the list are using GPU technology.
The most powerful system in Europe is a Bull system at the French CEA at No. 9.
Already 212 systems are using processors with six or more cores up from only 95 just six month ago. Quad-core processor-based systems still play an important role in the TOP500, as 231 systems are using them (down from 365).
The last system on the newest list was listed at position 262 six months ago. This turnover rate has steadily increased during the last few lists and is now above average.
Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 58.88 Pflop/s, compared to 43.7 Pflop/s six months ago and 32.4 Pflop/s one year ago.
The entry point for the TOP100 increased in six months from 75.76 Tflop/s to 88.92 Tflop/s.
The average concurrency level in the TOP500 is 15,550 cores per system, up from 13,071six months ago and 10,267 one year ago.
A total of 387 systems (77.4 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is slightly down from six months ago (398 systems 79.6 percent).
Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (77.4 percent) of TOP500 systems.
They are now followed by the AMD Opteron family with 65 systems (13.0 percent), up from 57.
The share of IBM Power processors has stabilized for now with 45 systems (9.0 percent), up from 40.
Intel’s Westmere processors increased their presence in the list strongly with 178 systems, compared with 56 in the last list.
19 systems use GPUs as accelerators (17 systems 6 month ago), 12 of these use NVIDIA chips, five use Cell processors, and two use ATI Radeon.
Gigabit Ethernet is still the most-used internal system interconnect technology (233 systems, up from 227 systems), due to its widespread use at industrial customers, followed by InfiniBand technology with 205 systems, down from 214 systems.
However, InfiniBand-based systems account for almost twice as much performance (23.0 Pflop/s) than Gigabit Ethernet ones (11.6 Pflop/s).
IBM and Hewlett-Packard continue to sell the bulk of the systems at all performance levels of the TOP500.
IBM kept its lead in systems and has now 213 systems (42.6 percent) compared to HP with 153 systems (30.4 percent). HP had 158 systems (31.6 percent) six months ago, compared to IBM with 200 systems (40 percent).
IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list in performance with 26.0 percent of installed total performance (down from 27.4 percent). Cray is again in the second place in this category with 15.4 percent down from 19.1 percent. Fujitsu gained the third spot due to the impressive performance of the No. 1 K Computer with 14.8 percent up from 1.4 percent. HP follows closely with 14.7 percent down from 15.6 percent.
In the system category, Cray, SGI, and Dell follow with 5.8 percent, 3.8 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.
IBM (147) and HP (133) together sold 280 out of 286 systems at commercial and industrial customers and have had this important market segment clearly cornered for some time now.
The U.S. is the leading consumer of HPC systems with 256 of the 500 systems (down from 274).
The European share (125 systems ) is still larger than the Asian share (103 systems – up from 84). Dominant countries in Asia are China with 62 systems (up from 42) and Japan with 26 systems (unchanged).
In Europe, Germany, UK, and France are almost equal with 30 (26), 27 (24), and 25 (26) respectively.
TOP500 now tracks actual power consumption of supercomputers in a consistent fashion.
29 systems on the list are confirmed to use more than 1 megawatt (MW) of power.
The No. 1 system, the K computer. also reports the highest total power consumption of 9.89 MW.
Average power consumption of a TOP500 system is 543 KW (up from 447 KW six months ago and 397 KW one year ago).
Average power efficiency is 248 Mflops/watt (up from 219 Mflops/watt six months ago and 195 Mflops/watt one year ago).
Average power consumption of a TOP10 system is 4.3 MW (up from 3.2 MW six months ago) and average power efficiency is 464 Mflops/watt up from 268 Mflops/watt six months ago.
The entry level into the TOP50 is at 159.6 Tflop/s
The U.S. share of the TOP50 has slipped to 44 percent down from 50 percent.
Japan, China, Germany, and France have each four to five systems (8-10 percent).
Cray leads the TOP50 with 34 percent of systems and 25 percent of performance.
IBM has 18 percent of systems and 12 percent of performance.
Fujitsu’s two system account for 26 percent of performance.
60 percent of systems are installed at research labs and 26 percent at universities.
There is only a single system using Gigabit Ethernet in the TOP50.
The average concurrency level is 76,650 cores per system – up from 64,618 cores per system six months ago and 49,080 one year ago.
All changes are from November 2010 to June 2011.
The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. For more information, visit www.top500.org