The 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world: IBM's Roadrunner in first place; An Israeli representative was ranked about 120

The first-ranked supercomputer is installed at the US nuclear research laboratories in Los Alamos ● The second place went to a computer made by Cray and in third place - a supercomputer made by SGI ● The Israeli representative is a supercomputer installed in the service of a semiconductor company operating in Israel, and it is considered the most powerful in Israel

A supercomputer made by IBM - built as part of the Roadrunner project for the US nuclear research laboratories in Los Alamos, reached first place this week in the ranking of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. According to the ranking, compiled by a team of researchers at the University of Mannheim in Germany and the University of Tennessee in the USA, the second place is occupied by a supercomputer manufactured by Cray, and in third place by a computer manufactured by SGI. IBM occupies the fourth and fifth places, followed by a computer from Sun - in sixth place. HP's supercomputer only came in at number 13 on the list. The Israeli representative, who came in 120th place, is a supercomputer installed in the service of a semiconductor company operating in Israel, and is considered the most powerful in the country. The name of the company has not been released.

From the numerical aspect, HP actually has an advantage when 209 supercomputers out of the 500, which make up 41.8% of the list, are manufactured by it. This figure places HP as the leading supplier of supercomputers in the world. In second place is IBM (computers - 186, 37.6%) and in third place is Cray (computers - 22, 4.4%).

The system made by IBM in Los Alamos performs about 1.105 peta-flops. Thus, in June of this year, this supercomputer was the first system in the world to cross the threshold of a quadrillion calculations per second (a billion billion operations per second). Project Roadrunner combines 12,240 PowerXCell 8i processors for broadband processing, in the same Cell processor chip architecture that powers all modern game consoles on the market - along with 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron processors. The AMD processors perform the basic calculation operations, while the PowerXCell 8i chips use their power for complex mathematical calculations, for which they were specially designed.

During the 15 years in which the list has been published, IBM has held first place 11 times - more than any other manufacturer. Since November 1999 and continuously, systems manufactured by IBM have been ranked first in the list - while the aggregate computing power of the IBM computers included in the ranking is greater than that of any other manufacturer. In the list published this week, 188 IBM supercomputing systems are included, responsible for about 38% of the aggregate computing capacity of all 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world: 6.5 peta-flops out of 16.9 peta-flops in total.

The list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, which is published twice a year, was revealed at a supercomputing conference held this week in Austin, Texas. The aforementioned report is considered an accepted benchmark for the technological capabilities of computing providers - and for 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.