Cray XT5 supercomputer beats out IBM Roadrunner

IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer has been dethroned from the TOP500 list in terms of computing performance by the Cray XT5 supercomputer, nicknamed Jaguar. The XT5 uses AMD Opteron cores and posted up a 1.75 petaflop/s speed in the Linpack test, outpacing the Roadrunner's 1 petaflop/s performance.

The Jaguar twice before finished as runner-up to the Roadrunner, but was recently upgraded in its home at the Department of Energy Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. The XT5 has a theoretical peak performance of 2.3 petaflop/s thanks to its approximate quarter million cores. During this latest test earlier this month, the Roadrunner clocked in at 1.04 petaflop/s, or a drop from an earlier 1.105 petaflop/s performance due to a repartitioning of the system.

The third spot was occupied by Kraken, another upgraded Cray XT5 system housed at the National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee, posting an 832 teraflop/s performance. Fourth was the first non US supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/P at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany, racking up an 825.5 teraflop/s number. Fifth was a newcomer to the list, the Tianhe-1 (which translates to River in Sky) system based in the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin, China. It uses Intel Xeon processors and AMD GPUs used as accelerators. Each node consists of two AMD graphics cards attached to two Intel Xeon processors.

Among the fastest computers on the list, quad-core processors are quickly gaining popularity, while just over 80 percent use Intel processors. IBM's Power processors are the second most common used processor family with 10.4 percent, while AMD's Opteron family accounts for 8.4 percent. The latter two represent drops, while Intel's share rose slightly.

By Electronista Staff

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AMD, Intel, computers, industry, IBM, Opteron, Cray, Jaguar, Roadrunner