Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the National Nuclear Security Administration and part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC) is the No. 1 system on the TOP500. It was first delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2011and now full deployed with an impressive 16.32 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores. Sequoia is one of the most energy efficient systems on the list consuming a total of 7.89.
Fujitsu’s “K Computer” installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, is now the No. 2 system on the TOP500 list with10.51 Pflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.
A second BlueGene/Q system (Mira) installed at Argonne National Laboratory is now at No. 3 with 8.15 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 786,432 cores.
The most powerful system in Europe and No.4 on the List is SuperMUC, an IBM iDataplex system with Intel Sandybridge installed at Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Germany.
The Chinese Tianhe-1A system, the No. 1 on the TOP500 in November 2010 is now the No. 5 with 2.57 Pflop/s Linpack performance.
The largest U.S. system in the previous list, the upgraded Jaguar, installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is holding on to the No. 6 spot with 1.94 Pflop/s Linpack performance.
Roadrunner, the first system to break the petaflop barrier in June 2008, is now listed at No 19.
There are 20 petaflop/s systems in the TOP500 List
The two Chinese systems at No. 5 and No. 10 and the Japanese Tsubame 2.0 system at No. 14 are all using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation and a total of 57 systems on the list are using Accelerator/Co-Processor technology.
The number of systems installed in China decreased from 74 in the previous to 68 in the current list. China still holds the No. 2 position as a user of HPC, ahead of Japan, UK, France, and Germany. Japan holds the No. 2 position in performance share.
Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (74.2 percent) of TOP500 systems.
Intel’s Westmere processors increased their presence in the list with 246 systems, compared with 240 in the last list.
Already 74.8 percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores.
57 systems use accelerators or co-processors (up from 39 six month ago), 52 of these use NVIDIA chips, two use Cell processors, and two use ATI Radeon and a one new system with Intel MIC technology.
IBM’s BlueGene/Q is now the most popular system in the TOP10 with 4 entries including the No. 1 and No. 3.
Italy makes a first debut in the TOP10 with an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at CINECA. The system is at position No. 7 in the List with 1.69 Pflop/s Linpack performance.
Already 74.8 percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores.
The entry level to the list moved up to the 60.8 Tflop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 50.9 Tflop/s six months ago.
The last system on the newest list was listed at position 330 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago.
Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 123.02 Pflop/s, compared to 74.2 Pflop/s six months ago and 58.7 Pflop/s one year ago.
The entry point for the TOP100 increased in six months from 115.9 Tflop/s to 172.6 Tflop/s.
The average concurrency level in the TOP500 is 26,866 cores per system, up from 18,383 six months ago and 15,520 one year ago.
A total of 372 systems (74.4 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is down from six months ago (384 systems 76.8 percent).
Intel is now followed by the AMD Opteron family with 63 systems (12.6 percent), same as in the in the previous list 6 months ago.
Intel’s SandyBridge processors considerably increased their presence in the list with 44 systems, compared with 10 in the last list.
57 systems use accelerators or co-processors (up from 39 six month ago), 52 of these use NVIDIA chips, two use Cell processors, and two use ATI Radeon and a one new system with Intel MIC technology.
For the first time, Gigabit Ethernet is now the second most-used internal system interconnect technology (207 systems, down from 224 systems), InfiniBand technology now has a slight lead with 208 systems, almost unchanged from 209 systems six months ago.
InfiniBand-based systems also account for almost twice as much performance (31.5 Pflop/s) than Gigabit Ethernet ones (13.3 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 138 systems (27.6 percent). HP is slightly down from 141 systems (28.2 percent) six months ago, compared to IBM with 223 systems (44.6 percent).
IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list in performance and considerably increased its share with 47.6 percent of installed total performance (up from 27.3 percent). HP and Fujitsu share the second place with 9.9 percent down from 13.1 and 14.7 percent respectively. Cray follows in third place in this category with 8.9 percent down from 14.3 percent.
In the system category, Cray, Appro, SGI, and Bull follow with 5.4 percent, 3.6 percent, 3.2 percent, and 3.2percent respectively.
IBM (140) and HP (109) together sold 249 out of 257 systems at commercial and industrial customers and have had this important market segment clearly cornered for some time now.
The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 252 of the 500 systems (down from 263). The European share (106 systems – up from 103) is still lower than the Asian share (121 systems – up from 118).
TOP500 now tracks actual power consumption of supercomputers in a consistent fashion.
40 systems on the list are confirmed to use more than 1 megawatt (MW) of power.
The No. 1 system, Sequoia, an IBM Bluegene/Q system reports the second highest total power consumption of 7.89 MW following the previous No.1, the K Computer which reported 12.65 MW power consumption.
Average power consumption of a TOP500 system is 671.3 kW (up from 634 kW six months ago and 543 kW one year ago).
Average power consumption of a TOP10 system is 4.09 MW (down from 4.56 MW six months ago)
Most energy efficient supercomputers are based on:
BlueGene/Q with 2,099 Mflops/watt (98, 99, 100, 101)
The No. 1, Sequoia with 2068 MFlops/watt
An Intel Cluster with SandyBridge and Intel MIC Technology installed at Intel with 1176 MFlops/watt (150)
An Appro Xtreme-X, SandyBridge based cluster installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory with 1050 MFlops/watt (73)
IBM iDataPlex DX360M4 Systems installed at various locations with 947.7 MFlops/watt
A Chinese system called Mole-8.5 with nVidia accelerators with 919 Mflops/watt (No. 21)
The TSUBAME 2.0 system at the GSIC Center in Tokyo with 865 Mflops/watt (No. 5)
The No. 2 Fujitsu K Computer at RIKEN with 830 Mflops/watt