Oh Baby!
Who's the Biggest of Them All?
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Story Filed: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 5:20 PM EST
Johannesburg, Dec 11, 2001 (ITWeb/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- IBM's ASCI White still rules the supercomputer lists, according to the latest Top500 supercomputer list released earlier this month.
The Top500 list is published by the universities of Mannheim and Tennessee.
The list was first published in June 1993 and is compiled with the help of computer scientists, manufacturers, the Internet community and high-performance computer experts.
The 18th version of the list, which is released twice a year, puts IBM's 8192-copper processor monster on top for the third time in a row. The ASCI White computer is the size of two basketball courts and is used by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory for nuclear research.
In second place is the 3024-processor Compaq Alphaserver SC used by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre. IBM takes two other places in the top five, including its ASCI Blue supercomputer also used by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
Despite dominating the top rungs of the Top500 list, IBM's position is not as secure on other lists, in particular a new list released by the International Data Corporation (IDC) earlier this month. The new IDC list instead ranks the Pittsburgh Compaq Alphaserver at number one with ASCI White taking up second position.
The IDC says the new list better reflects real-world computing scenarios and uses a number of new criteria for selection, including the Spec FP benchmark as well as the Stream measurement of data transfer. The IDC list, however, still includes the Linpack measurement - the standard on which the Top500 lists is built.
While the Top500 list is dominated by 241 US-based machines, with Europe in second place at 162, Japan is a significant third place with 57 of the 500 based in the country. South-East Asia follows with 25 followed by South America (with eight), Australia (5) and the Middle East (2).
Vendor-wise, IBM and HP account for almost half of the total supercomputers in the market with IBM largely dominating the high-end and HP selling significant quantities into the "lower" end.
Cray, traditional maker of supercomputers, only has 39 listings in the Top500, although on the new IDC listing the company dominates with almost double the listings than those attributed to IBM.
Cray also came out tops on the "enterprise computers" section of the IDC list for computers costing $1 million or more. The $250 000 to $1 million market was topped by SGI with HP heading the sub-$250 000 list.
Sun Microsystems lost significant ground over the past year on the supercomputer front with only 30 listings on the latest Top500, compared with 90 listings on last year's list. Other losers include IBM, which is down from 215 to 160 listed systems, and SGI, down from 67 to 40.
The big winner on this year's Top500 list is HP with more than 150 listed systems, largely in the lower end of the list.
by Alastair Otter
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