Cray Returns to Top Dog Status

Over the weekend the rankings in the supercomputer world got shaken up one more time. IBM had been on top for some time with its Roadrunner, but now a new Cray implementation, called Jaguar, has taken the top spot. This is actually the first time Cray has been at the top of these ratings, as Cray was not pushing the envelope for quite some time – around Cray 3, I believe.

from Maximum PC

IBM’s Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is no longer the planet’s most powerful supercomputer. That distinction now belongs to a Cray supercomputer named “Jaguar” at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which regained the performance crown over the weekend, ComputerWorld reports.

Jaguar, which benefited from a few recent upgrades, is now capable of 1,759 petaflops per second courtesy of 224,162 processor cores. That’s enough to jump ahead of IBM’s Roadrunner, which dropped to 1,042 petaflops per second after it was repartitioned.

Number three on the list of supercomputers is Kraken at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee. Kraken is capable of churning out 832 teraflops per second and was ranked No. 6 in June.

One of the more interesting supercomputers belongs to China. The hybrid Intel-AMD Tianhe-1 in the city of Tianjin pushes out 563 teraflops per second, putting it in fifth place. China’s supercomputer combines Intel’s Xeon processors with AMD-brand GPUs as accelerators. Each node contains two Xeon chips attached to two AMD GPUs.

Wonder how much actual work gets done between benchmark sessions? Me too.

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