The latest version of the Top500 List of the world’s most powerful computers is now out, demonstrating once again that the pace of supercomputer performance continues to accelerate.
As it turns out the same top 10 supercomputers that led the Top500 list in June of 2011 are the same that lead the list in November.
“This is the first time since we began publishing the list back in 1993 that the top 10 systems showed no turnover,” said TOP500 editor Erich Strohmaier in a statement.
While the same computers dominate the list, they haven’t been standing still as deployments and performance have expanded.
Coming in at number one is the Fujitsu ‘K’ computer at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan. The K Computer is the first supercomputer to break through the Petaflop barrier scoring 10.51 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark. A petaflop is a unit of measure for a quadrillion calculations per second.
The K Computer is the defending supercomputer champ, and was also number one in the June 2011 ranking, though at a lower petaflop count. In June, K Computer deliver 8.16 petaflops, but has since been expanded. Fujitsu now has a staggering 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores powering the K Computer installation.
