U.S. Retains Supercomputing Crown as Linux Dominates

Though the U.S remains the leader, this month’s top supercomputer is a new machine, displacing the previous champion, the IBM Sequoia. The U.S. reclaimed the crown of world’s fastest in June of this year with the Linux-powered Sequoia, which is installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

Sequoia’s top spot came after a three year absence for the U.S. in terms of holding the global supercomputing crown. While Sequoia originally clocked in at 16.32 petaflops per second, it’s now been displaced by the Cray-built Titan system, which clocks in at 17.59 Petaflops per second.

Titan is powered by 560,640 processors, which is actually less than the 1,572,864 cores that power Sequoia. Titan was turned on at the end of October at the U.S Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.

The November 2012 Top 500 Supercomputer list also confirms the dominance of Linux in the HPC space. 469 out of 500 machines on the list are currently powered by Linux.

Read the full story at ServerWatch:
Titan Claims Supercomputing Crown

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.