IBM-built machines accounted for over half the listings on this year's TOP500 supercomputer rankings. IBM's BlueGene/L supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory earned the top spot on the list, followed by a similar BlueGene machine at IBM's own Watson Research Center in New York.

According to IBM, BlueGene/L earned the top spot by sustaining a performance of 136.8 Teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second), while the Watson-based BlueGene machine turned in 91.29 Teraflops. BlueGene/L will eventually deliver some 360 Teraflops, when it is completed later this summer, IBM says.

IBM says 2005 marks the first year that any single company claimed more than half of all TOP500 listings. The complete listings are available here.

BlueGene/L

BlueGene/L first arrived on the TOP500 supercomputer list in 2003, when, as a prototype little bigger than a 30-inch television, it ranked 73rd. Last fall, the system turned in a performance of 70.72 Teraflops, despite having only reached a quarter of its planned size.

The BlueGene/L has lower power, space, and cooling requirements than other supercomputers
(Click to enlarge)

The BlueGene/L system was developed in partnership with the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). What does the NNSA plan to use it for? “The Blue Gene architecture will run certain problems at tremendous speeds, ten times faster than previously possible,” said Dimitri Kusnezov, Director of the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing program, in a statement issued today. “Once complete, the National Nuclear Security Administration will have available the kind of national security tool needed to rapidly analyze urgent nuclear weapons stockpile aging issues. It will support broader simulation codes to support certification of our stockpile.”

Linux inside

BlueGene/L's compute nodes are based on low-power dual-core PowerPC embedded processors running a “Linux-like” operating system, according to IBM. The system's control nodes run an embedded Linux operating system.

For a complete overview of IBM's BlueGene/L technology, and the role of Linux, be sure to read our look inside BlueGene. Additional details and photos of the prototype BlueGene/L are here.

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