IBM Blue Genes Dominate List of Fastest Supercomputers

IBM Accounts for 42% of Total Computing Power in Official Tally of 500 Most Powerful Computers in the World.

ARMONK, NY -IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Blue Gene®/L supercomputer continued its four-year reign atop the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list announced today. IBM systems account for 42% of the combined computational might of the planet’s most powerful computers -- more than any other supercomputer vendor, according to the list.

In addition, the development version of IBM’s newest Blue Gene/P solution(1) burst onto the list at number 30. Launched yesterday, the two-rack test system delivers 20.86 teraflops in a space the size of two refrigerator-sized racks. When it is fully scaled out, Blue Gene/P can be configured to reach up to three petaflops -- or three thousand trillion calculations per second.

IBM dominates the Top 10 with a total of six systems -- four of them Blue Gene supercomputers. The number one Blue Gene/L system, installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, delivers a sustained performance of 280.6 trillion operations per second or teraflops.

IBM systems account for 46 of the Top 100. Thirty-nine of them are built on IBM’s POWER® architecture hardware running versions of Unix (AIX) and Linux software.

This year, two new IBM Blue Gene supercomputers entered into the Top 10. “New York Blue,” at the New York Center for Computational Science in Stony Brook, N.Y., and the Blue Gene system at the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

Joining the Blue Gene/L system at Lawrence Livermore in the TOP500 list’s Top 10 are IBM Watson Research Lab’s own Blue Gene system at 91.29 teraflops. In addition to Blue Gene systems, IBM’s POWER-based ASC Purple supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is number six.

IBM’s MareNostrum supercomputer, built on IBM BladeCenter JS21 blade servers and located at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, retained its position as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, ranking number 9 on the overall list. IBM also has the biggest system in China, a BladeCenter cluster at Sinopec ShengLI Oilfield Branch Company, Geophysical Research Institute.

Based on IBM’s POWER Architecture, the IBM System Blue Gene Solution is optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today’s fastest systems. A variety of industries are using Blue Gene systems to advance their research capabilities for life sciences, financial modeling, hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, astronomy and space research and climate modeling.

The “TOP500 Supercomputer Sites” is compiled and published by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany). The entire list can be viewed at www.top500.org.