Most Powerful Known Computer Systems In The World

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Below you can see Top 4 positions of the 32nd TOP500 List released during the ISC08 conference, November 14, 2008 in Austin, Texas.

IBM Roadrunner is a supercomputer built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. Currently the world's fastest computer. Roadrunner is designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops (FLoating point Operations Per Second), achieving 1.026 on May 25, 2008. Roadrunner occupies approximately 6,000 square feet.

Roadrunner is unique for its hybrid design using two different models of processors.

AMD Opteron 2210, running at 1.8 GHz. These are processors with two general purpose cores each. Opterons are used both in the computational nodes feeding the Cells with useful data and in the system operations and communication nodes passing data between computing nodes and helping the operators running the system. Roadrunner has a total of 6912 Opteron processors (6480 computation, 432 operation), for a total of (12960+864) 13824 cores.
IBM PowerXCell 8i, running at 3.2 GHz. These processors have one general purpose core , and eight special performance cores for floating point operations. Roadrunner has a total of 12960 PowerXCell processors, with 12960 PPE cores and 103680 SPE cores, for a total of 116640 cores.

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Jaguar installation has a total of 11,706 processor nodes. Of those, 11,508 are configured as compute nodes and the remainder provide I/O and login services. Each of the compute nodes contain 2.6 GHz dual-core AMD Opteron processors and 4 GB of memory. The service nodes consist of a 2.6 GHz dual-core AMD Opteron processor with 8 GB of memory. The system provides an aggregate peak performance of over 119 Teraflops with approximately 46 terabytes of aggregate memory. The system has approximately 600 TB of scratch disk space available for use in the lustre filesystem.


Pleiades is a supercomputer built by SGI at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Still in construction phase, it is currently the world's third fastest computer with a peak performance of more than 600 teraflops. After further extensions, Pleiades is scheduled to reach 1,000 teraflops (1 petaflops) in 2009, and 10 petaflops in 2012. The Pleiades supercomputer is an SGI Altix ICE system with 12,800 Intel Xeon quad-core processors (51,200 cores, 100 racks) running at 487 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops) on the LINPACK benchmark, the industry standard for measuring a system's floating point computing power.

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Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS ( FLoating point Operations Per Second ) range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS. It is a cooperative project among IBM , the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy, and academia. There are four Blue Gene projects in development: BlueGene/L, BlueGene/C, BlueGene/P, and BlueGene/Q.

The Blue Gene supercomputer is unique in the following aspects:

* Trading the speed of processors for lower power consumption.
* Dual processors per node with two working modes: co-processor (1 user process/node: computation and communication work is shared by two processors) and virtual node (2 user processes/node)
* System-on-a-chip design
* A large number of nodes (scalable in increments of 1024 up to at least 65,536)
* Three-dimensional torus interconnect with auxiliary networks for global communications, I/O, and management
* Lightweight OS per node for minimum system overhead (computational noise)



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