The Top 500 list of the world’s faster supercomputers is a who’s-who of the government agencies and research labs operating the most high-performance computers around. It’s also a source of major bragging rights for hardware vendors looking to strut their stuff and make a case for the computing power of their offerings.
That’s become increasingly important as the same sorts of technologies used in many of today’s supercomputers are also available to enterprises who may be doing far less dramatic work, but are still looking for advancements in cost-effective processing power.
ServerWatch takes a look at the latest Top 500 results, and at Nvidia’s big win — which also represents a victory for computing using graphics processors.
Despite all of Nvidia’s talk in recent years about the potential for GPUs in supercomputing, when the Top 500 supercomputer list came out last November, it was rival AMD that made the list with a Chinese supercomputer called Milky Way, which used a combination of Intel Xeons along with 2560 ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards to build the first petaflop computer outside the U.S. and the first to use graphics processors.
Six months later and Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) is on top, thanks to another Chinese monster computer called Nebulae. The blade system uses Intel X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPUs to achieve a theoretical peak performance of 2.98 petaflops per second, or PFlop/s, according to the latest Top 500 list of supercomputers in the world.
