The Sun Blade X6420 and Sun Constellation placed Sun in the top 10 of the Top500 Supercomputer List, which lists the world’s most powerful supercomputers biannually.

Announced at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference, the Sun Blade X6420 is part of the Ranger supercomputer that is housed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Landing at number 8, Ranger achieved 433.20 teraflop/s (trillions of floating point operations per second) on Linpack benchmarks.

The Sun Constellation System is part of JUROPA that is installed at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany. JUROPA achieved 274.8 Tflop/s and is built from Bull Novascale and Sun Blade x6048 servers. It is also the most efficient system among the Top 10 supercomputers as measured by the Linpack benchmark.

Adding to Sun's increased presence on the list is the fact that nine of the top 10 supercomputers are using Sun Storage technologies, including Lustre and tape storage.

The closely watched TOP500 list, issued twice a year, both confers bragging rights on research institutions and manufacturers and serves as a valuable tool for tracking trends in supercomputer performance and architectures. The latest list reflects changes from November 2008 to June 2009.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 291 of the 500 systems (unchanged from 291). The European share (145 systems – down from 151) is settling down after having risen for some time, but is still substantially larger than the Asian share (49 systems – up from 47).

Holding onto the No. 1 spot with 1.105 petaflop/s (quadrillions of floating point operations per second) is the Roadrunner system at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) which was built by IBM and in June 2008 became the first system ever to break the petaflop/s Linpack barrier.

The remaining top 10 are:

• 2) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States with Jaguar from Cray Inc. with 1059.00 petaflop/s

• 3) FZJ, Germany with JUGENE from IBM with 825.50 Tflop/s

• 4) NASA/Ames Research Center/NAS, United States with Pleiades from SGI with 487.01 Tflop/s

• 5) DOE/NNSA/LLNL, United States with BlueGene/L by IBM with 478.20 Tflop/s

• 6) National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee, United States with Kraken XT5 by Cray Inc. with 463.30 Tflop/s

• 7) Argonne National Laboratory, United States by IBM with 458.61 Tflop/s

• 8) Texas Advanced Computing Center/Univ. of Texas United States with Ranger from Sun Microsystems with 433.20 Tflop/s

• 9) DOE/NNSA/LLNL, United States with Dawn from IBM with 415.70 Tflop/s

• 10) FZJ, Germany with JUROPA from Sun Microsystems with 274.80 Tflop/s

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

More Information

TOP500 List - June 2009 (1-100)

International Supercomputing Conference '09

New Julich Supercomputer Center and its 2000 Node Sun Constellation System

Processors on TACC's Ranger Get Upgrade

Highlights on Sun's Petascale Computing at TACC

TACC Ranger Up and Running

Sun Constellation System

Sun Blade 6048 Modular System [...read more...]

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