Top 500 List Means Plenty of Bragging Rights - Page 2

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Blades reach the cutting edge of high end systems.

Two-thirds of the systems on the list are blade systems , which reflects a growing interest in the technology.

"The rapid adoption of HP BladeSystem technology, including the HP BL2x220C, on the TOP500 supercomputer list, clearly reflects HP's ability to deliver customers computing technology optimized for large scale-out and emerging cloud computing environments," said Christine Martino, vice president and general manager of the Scalable Computing Infrastructure unit at HP in a statement.

Quad-core processors have rapidly taken over the list from dual core, with 283 of the 500 systems using quad-core, including the entire top 10. Only 11 systems on this list are single-core. Three systems use Cell, which has nine cores.

More than ever, the x86 architecture rules the list. Just four years ago, 45 percent of the machines were IA-32-based. As 32-bit has died off, 64-bit architectures have taken over. Intel's EM64T, the Xeon architecture, is in 356 of the systems, almost three-fourths of the list. Add the 16 IA-64 Itanium systems and 55 AMD x86_64 systems and that's 427 servers, or 85 percent of the total.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) has some bragging rights, but also some work to do. It owns the number 1, 4, 5, 12, 16, and 20 positions with its Quad Core Opteron, compared to four of the top 20 going to Intel (NASDAQ: INTC). But it's lost ground, too. It had 108 of the top 500 a year ago, then fell to 79 on the November 2007 list, and now holds just 55 of the top 500.

Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions for AMD, wasn't surprised and attributed it to the tardiness of Barcelona. "What you see is, this is a community that always goes for the fastest, newest, best," she told InternetNews.com. "You can see that with our competitor beating us with getting quad core out. What that means is it will be interesting to see how this list looks in November."

More massive systems are on the horizon, including Pleiades, the new NASA supercomputer being built by SGI and Intel, which will have one petaflop of performance by the time it's fully up and running this year.