IBM and Intel power ahead with supercomputing

IBM and Intel have edged ahead on a quickly changing list of the 500 fastest supercomputers.

Hewlett-Packard leads the herd with 159 systems on the list, which is set to be released today, up from 137 six months ago. But IBM has almost caught up by increasing from 131 to 158. Meanwhile, the number of systems based on Intel processors - mostly Xeons but now a handful of Itaniums as well- increased from 56 to 119.

Big Blue continues to lead when it comes to the largest fraction of the total computing horsepower. Of the total ability of 375 trillion calculations per second, or teraflops, IBM machines account for 34 per cent. More than a tenth of the total comes from the Japanese Earth Simulator, a behemoth with a 36 teraflop rating.

Sun Microsystems, despite a new high-performance computing effort, has only nine systems on the list.

The Top500 list is released twice each year by researchers from the University of Mannheim and the University of Tennessee. And although it always changes, the flux in the new list is higher than usual.

Turnover is high, for one thing. The lowest-ranked system on the new list has a speed of 245 gigaflops, or 245 billion calculations per second. Six months ago, that was enough performance for a comfortable top-300 ranking.

And there are new varieties of systems arriving, including Cray's new X1, which holds 10 spots starting with No. 112.

A Windows system has also made a rare appearance. This cluster of Dell Computer servers with 384 Xeon processors built at the Cornell Theory Center ranked high at number 50.

And turning up at number 362 is a Hewlett-Packard system with 64 of Intel's forthcoming Itanium 2 6M "Madison" processors running at 1.5GHz. The system has a speed of 335 gigaflops.

Eighth place went to an HP system with 1,540 Itanium 2 processors at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

But Xeon processors are the main reason for Intel's climb.

The company's jump up the list is largely due to increased performance and lower costs, said Tom Gibbs, director of industry marketing at Intel. Intel deliberately worked on keeping prices down to prompt a massive change in the high-performance computing market.

"The hypothesis we had three years ago was that by altering the price-performance [ratio] in these machines, we would see a dramatic increase in demand," Gibbs said. "A year ago we had three systems on the list."

One trend Gibbs noted is that the number of processors in the Intel systems is declining due to increasing speeds. In the last version of the list, the smallest Intel machine had 128 Xeons. The current one has 92.

For more information, you can see the full list here.

Stephen Shankland writes for News.com