(Image: the K Computer, courtesy RIKEN)
The 37th edition of the “TOP500 List of the world’s top supercomputers” was released today at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg. At first place, a Japanese supercomputer capable of performing more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop/s): the K Computer, developed in partnership with Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe.
The ranking of all systems is based on how fast they run Linpack, a benchmark application developed to solve a dense system of linear equations.
For the first time, all of the top 10 systems achieved petaflop/s performance – and those are also the only petaflop/s systems on the list. The U.S. is tops in petaflop/s with five systems performing at that level; Japan and China have two each, and France has one.
Bumped to second place after capturing No. 1 on the previous list is the Tianhe-1A supercomputer the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, with a performance at 2.6 petaflop/s. Also moving down a notch was Jaguar, a Cray supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at No. 3 with 1.75 petaflop/s.
Rounding out the Top 10 are Nebulae at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Shenzen (1.27 petaflop/s), Tsubame 2.0 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (1.19 petaflop/s), Cielo at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (1.11 petaflop/s), Pleiades at the NASA Ames Research Center in California (1.09 petaflop/s), Hopper at DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in California (1.054 petaflop/s), Tera 100 at the CEA (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives) in France (1.05 petaflop/s), and Roadrunner at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (1.04 petaflop/s).
More: Top500.org. NASA’s related press release about the Pleiades supercomputer at Ames is here.