IBM continues to rule in the Supercomputer market

IBM continues to rule in the Supercomputer market

International Business Machines (IBM) continues to dominate the supercomputer market as their products retains the top spot in the most powerful computers present in the world today. Their Blue Gene machines hold the top two positions in the list of top 500 most powerful computers in the world today.

The top spot is taken by the BlueGene/L, which has doubled its size and performance since the last time it was labeled the number 1 on the list. It now performs at 136.8 teraflops as per the reports using the Linpack benchmark. This supercomputer is expected to touch a top processing speed of 360 teraflops later this year with further addition of a 64-rack system with over 130,000 IBM PowerPC processors. BlueGene/L resides at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Livermore California and is a product of collaboration between IBM and the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The second computer on the list is also a BlueGene but a smaller model. It is called the Watson Blue Gene system and it performs at 91.2 teraflops. It is a fairly new developed model and is installed at the IBM’s Thomas J.Watson Research Center in Yorktown, N.Y.

Interestingly, many systems from the last year’s list no longer exist on this year’s updated list. Half of the Top 10 systems are replaced by newer faster models and around 201 systems from the last year’s list are out of the top 500.