China has joined the short list of nations with one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. And IBM has been knocked off the top spot for the first time in five years.

The figures come in the TOP500 list issued twice a year by researchers in Germany and the United States. It ranks computers on the maximum speed with which they perform calculations in tests (rather than their theoretical maximum).

The IBM RoadRunner, housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, had been the leader since last June, with another IBM machine hold the top spot between 2004 and 2008. It’s now been knocked off the top by the Cray-produced Jaguar (pictured, courtesy Oak Ridge National Lab).

The Jaguar didn’t just take the lead: it took it by a landslide. The highest mark reached by the RoadRunner was 1.105 petaflops: that’s one million billion calculations per second. At the time that was considered something of a landmark in computing history. The Jaguar achieved 1.75 petaflops to take the crown.

To put the scale of the Jaguar into context, the average consumer PC has a processor with one, two or four cores. The Jaguar has the best part of 200,000 cores.

Stored at the National Center for Computational Science, the Jaguar is mainly used for solving scientific problems, for example in mapping the effects of climate change. Around 80 percent of its use is allocated to researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds who put forward applications to say how it could benefit their projects.

Although IBM lost the number one position, it still dominates the list: while second to
HP in the number of machines in the top 500, its computers are responsible for 35.1 percent of the overall speed.

While international machines had challenged U.S. dominance in recent lists, only one supercomputer from outside the country makes the new top ten. That’s the Tianhe-1, the highest ranked Chinese machine in history. It’s used for petroleum exploration and simulating the design of large aircrafts.

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Entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 10:47 am under Technology.

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