"IBM has regained dominance on a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers and has also landed two unusual prototypes in the top 10. Of the systems on the latest Top500 list, Big Blue built 224 and Hewlett-Packard built 140, giving IBM back the lead it lost in 2001. Two new systems, ranked No. 4 and No. 8, are prototypes of Blue Gene/L, a system that uses vastly less space and power than its competitors," reports CNet.
More than half the Top 500 systems (281, in fact) are clusters:
"Clusters, often using Linux running on computers with Intel or AMD processors, don't run some jobs as efficiently as more monolithic designs. But they work well enough at a low enough price that major customers are snapping them up. For example, of the seven Boeing supercomputers on this Top500, six are clusters using Xeon processors and one is a Cray X1.
"And clusters let Dell, a company better known for its reliance on Intel and Microsoft research than its own engineering abilities, build the No 5 system called Tungsten at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications."
Comment: Intel will be pleased: the list includes 287 machines based on Intel chips, compared with 119 last year. The Thunderer at Lawrence Livermore, the world's second fastest, uses 4,096 Intel Itanium 2 processors.
Also, while the US has the more than half the supercomputers on the list -- 255 -- the UK comes second with 36.
Update: Today, Intel has sent out a press release to say that more than half the 500 fastest are based on its chips. It adds: "Three years ago, Intel only had three systems on the list." That's quite a shift.
For those keeping count, there are 61 Itanium systems and 225 Xeon systems.
