IBM displaced Intel to take the No. 1 spot in the latest version of the Top500 list, released Friday before the SC 2000 supercomputing conference inDallas. The top machine, called ASCI White, has 8,192 CPUs, weighs 106 tons and takes up two basketballcourts' worth of floor space.
IBM has five of the top 10 machines, up from two in the last version of thelist six months ago. The total number of IBM systems increased from 144 to215, the largest for any manufacturer. And IBM computers account for 43percent of the combined power of the 500 machines, up from 29 percent sixmonths ago.
Sun Microsystems, with a supercomputer push of its own and92 systems on the list, won second place. SGI's 67 machines placed it inthird. Newly independent Crayhad 47 for fourth place, but its comparatively powerful systems accountedfor 16 percent of the list's total power, placing it second after IBM inthat measure. With 23 systems on the list, NEC took fifth place.
Intel's ASCI Red machine was at the top of the list for at least two years,but Intel never followed up with a supercomputer program of its own.
"IBM is dominating the Top500," said University of Tennessee computerscientist Erich Strohmaier, one of the compilers of the list.
But there's a catch.
The list is based on a mathematical calculation speed test called Linpack, but most agreethe measurement is imperfect because it doesn't necessarily show how well asupercomputer will work in the real world. It's like the difference betweenhow fast a video card can draw triangles and how fast it will run "Doom."
To amend the situation, the Top500 organizers, computer makers and industryresearch firm IDC have allied to release a new suite ofperformance tests.
"The new test suite is intended to supplement limited standard tests such asLinpack...and to eliminate the need to rely on theoretical 'peakperformance' figures, which may be nearly meaningless in practice," theorganizations said in a statement. Linpack measures CPU speed, but notinternal memory, hard disks or networks, Strohmaier said in the statement.
Supercomputers are high-speed machines used to perform heavy-dutycomputational jobs such as predicting the Earth's climate 50 years from now,modeling car crashes, analyzing the stock market or simulatingnext-generation CPUs. The top four computers on the list are sponsored bythe Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program to model nuclear weaponsexplosions.
IBM is aggressively pushing its SP modelUnix servers, hoping that customers such as biotech companies or banks will buythe machines.