Metrics 2.0: IBM dominates TOP500 Supercomputer list, accounting for 240 of the top 500


IBM systems account for 240 of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world and more than half the total processing power. IBM's Blue Gene/L developed and installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory tops the list with a performance of 280.6 Teraflops, or trillions of floating point calculations per second.

IBM remains the dominant vendor of supercomputers with almost half of the list (48.6%) carrying its label. Also, four of the TOP10 systems are from IBM. Hewlett-Packard (HP) remains unchallenged at the second position in this survey with 30.8% of all systems.

Intel microprocessors are at the heart of 301 of all 500 systems. AMD’s Opteron processors are also steadily and rapidly gaining ground, now with 81 systems using them compared to only 25 systems one year ago.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 298 of the 500 systems installed there. The European share continues to decline with now 83 systems down from 100 six month ago, while Asia mounted a turn-around with now 93 systems up from 66 six month ago.

The June 2006 TOP500 list of supercomputers can be found at http://www.top500.org/.

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IBM dominates TOP500 Supercomputer list, accounting for 240 of the top 500