World's top 10 fastest supercomputers

There's a new numero uno in the World's fastest supercomputers ranking, reveals the bi-annual Top500 list. The Top500 supercomputers list is compiled by researchers at the University of Mannheim (Germany), Berkeley National Laboratory (US) and the University of Tennessee (US).

Just as in the last time's ranking, the Top500 list is made up mostly of Hewlett-Packard and IBM computers. HP accounted for 210 of this year's 500, and IBM 185. In terms of processors, Intel still enjoys the lion's share, with 80 percent. The most popular operating system continues to be Linux, with 90 percent share.

Here's over to the world's top 10 fastest supercomputers.
 
 

The world's fastest supercomputer is Cray XT5, also known as Jaguar. Jaguar bags the no. 1 spot, beating IBM's Roadrunner, who has been holding the top crown since past 18 months.

Jaguar recently upgraded its quad-core CPUs to hex-core Opteron processors, which meant a 2.3 petaflop per second theoretical performance peak (”nearly a quarter of a million cores”), and 1.75 petaflops measured by the Linpack benchmark. This surpasses Roadrunner's 1.04 petaflop/s. A petaflop/s refers to 1 quadrillion calculations per second.

Jaguar, located at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, came close to beating Roadrunner in the two previous Top500 lists. This time, however, Roadrunner's performance fell from 1.105 petaflop/s in June due to a repartitioning of the system.
 
At no. 2 is IBM Roadrunner, which was crowned No. 1 in June 2008 after becoming the first supercomputer to break one petaflop/s. IBM’s Roadrunner managed 1.042 petaflops. The supercomputer is located at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Roadrunner which also used IBM's own chips plus AMD Opteron technology, actually decreased in performance to 1.042 petaflops due to a repartitioning of the system.