IBM holds the first three places in the ranking of the fastest computers in the world and 210 of the 500 most powerful computers in the world
IBM's new Roadrunner computer, which recently crossed the petaflops barrier for the first time in history, which performs a quadrillion (million billion) processing operations per second, was ranked first in the list of the world's fastest computers that was just published.
IBM's new computer pushed into second place another IBM supercomputer installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which has held the world performance record since November 2004. In third place was the IBM Blue Gene/P computer installed in the Department of Energy at the National Laboratory in Chicago.
The ranking of the 500 most powerful computers in the world, compiled by a team of researchers at the University of Mannheim in Germany and the University of Tennessee in the USA, is considered an accepted benchmark for the technological capabilities of computing providers - and the economic, scientific and military power of the countries that own these supercomputers, and use them for a wide variety of applications: From the development of nuclear weapons to the development of new drugs.
In the new ranking, 210 of the 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world belong to IBM, which as mentioned was ranked first before HP, which is in second place with 183 systems.
375 of the 500 computers on the list use Intel or AMD processors. The world's most powerful supercomputer, IBM's Roadrunner, combines such processors - AMD "Barcelona" in the X86 architecture, together with thousands of IBM's Cell processors, into one hybrid setup that enables operational efficiency and peak performance.
IBM has increased the market share of computers based on processors produced by it at the top of the world's computing: 68 systems in the list of 500 use Power processors or Cell processors that integrate the Power architecture - compared to 61 systems in the previous list. During the last half of the year, IBM passed AMD as the chip supplier to the top of supercomputers.
It should be noted that all three of the most powerful systems on the list are based on IBM processors and are manufactured by it. Only in fourth place is a Sun system based on AMD processors, and in fifth - a Kray system also based on these chips.
