HAVING doubled the number of processors in its BlueGene/L system, IBM has once again topped the twice-yearly supercomputer chart, the “Top 500”. The machine, housed at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear lab in California, has held top billing for 18 months, and now runs at 280,000 billion floating point operations (teraflops) per second. No competitor has yet broken the 100,000 teraflops barrier.
Demonstrating the power of PC clusters, an array of 8000 standard Dell PCs is at number 5 (see Chart), one place ahead of a 10,800-processor system from supercomputer veteran Cray Research.
NEC’s climate-modelling Earth Simulator, which held the top slot for two-and-a-half…
