AMD Supercomputer Debuts in Top Rankings
By Tim McDonald, www.NewsFactor.com
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD - news) has sneaked onto the world's top 500 supercomputer rankings for the first time, though IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) continues to dominate the list with six of the 10 most powerful systems in the world, including the top two.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world continues to be IBM's ASCI White at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it is engaged in energy research. No. 2 is an IBM machine doing research at a Berkeley laboratory, and No. 3 is Intel's ASCI Red at Sandia National Laboratories. Others in the top 10 include Hitachi, SGI and NEC.
The top 500 list has been released twice a year since 1993 by a group of "high-performance computer experts, computational scientists, manufacturers, and the Internet community."
The list is compiled jointly by the computer science departments of the University of Tennessee and Germany's University of Mannheim.
439th and Moving Up
The inclusion of AMD's supercomputer, the PRESTO III, is significant because it shows the company's technology can handle processor-intensive scientific applications. AMD's Athlon processor has been engaged in an unofficial speed war with Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC - news) Pentium computer chip and others for the last year or more.
"It certainly shows we are players in all sorts of different lines of computing," AMD spokesperson Lawreen Chernow told NewsFactor Network. "I think that's extremely important, particularly for our commercial customers and potential customers."
AMD's PRESTO III, ranked No. 439, was built by the Tokyo Institute of Technology and contains 78 AMD Athlon processors.
It is used to run simulation and scientific applications such as operations research, high-energy physics, and neuroscience at the Matsuoka Laboratory of the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center.
The project director, Dr. Satoshi Mausuoka, said the company's goal is to move into the top half of the rankings in the next six months.
Supercomputers Getting Faster
The list shows that supercomputers are getting faster -- the minimum entry level is 67.8 gigaflops (GF), compared to 55.1 GF six months ago, and the entry point for the top 100 moved from 181 to 241 GF. A gigaflop is one billion floating point operations per second.
Sun Microsystems ranks behind IBM in the number of systems on the list with 81, and is fourth in performance. SGI is third with respect to systems, 63, and third in performance.
The U.S. has eight of the top 10 most powerful supercomputers, and a total of 254. The U.S. is followed by Germany, 64; Japan, 54; the UK, 31; France, 20 and Italy, 12.
In terms of manufacturers, only two countries currently make supercomputers powerful enough to make the list: the U.S. has 452 represented, and Japan has 48. Industry has more of the top 500 supercomputers with 235, followed by research, 118; academic institutions, 92; "classified," 38; vendors with 13; and government with three.
Telecommunications and finance are the biggest industry users.
100 Teraflops by 2005
Supercomputers have evolved dramatically since a Cray system first achieved supercomputer status in the 1970s. It was used for research in areas like fluid dynamics and mechanical engineering, but applications had to be hand-coded for the specific systems being used because of the lack of programming tools.
In the 1980s, commercial software packages became available, and the late 1980s saw massive parallel computing (MPP), which led to commercial uses in the 1990s in areas such as database applications and data mining.
There is now a diversity of architectures and applications in the supercomputer industry, and researchers say they expect to have the first 100 teraflop system by 2005. A teraflop equals one trillion floating point operations per second. |
