List of Supercomputers
- The Tianhe-1A supercomputer, housed in the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China, was designed by the National University of Defense Technology, or NUDT. When it went into operation, it set a new performance record at 2.507 Petaflops (one petaflop equals a thousand trillion operations per second). To achieve such power, it combines 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs with 14,336 CPUs. The completion of the Tianhe-1A marked the end of the US dominance of supercomputing.
- The Cray XT5 Jaguar, located at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or OLCF, is currently the world's second fastest supercomputer, and has achieved an incredible peak speed of 2.33 petaflops. The Jaguar is used to simulate the interaction of physical systems - from the explosion of stars to the building blocks of matter. The supercomputer is also used to create ultra high resolution climate models.
- The IBM Road Runner is the world's third fastest supercomputer, and was the firstto break the "petaflop barrier." Designed by IBM as the world's first hybrid supercomputer, it utilizes Cell Broadband Engine Chips -- which were originally designed for use in the PlayStation 3 -- in tandem with AMD x86 processors. Designed for use by the US Department of Energy, it was twice as fast as the previous record holder, the Blue Gene, when it was released.
- The Blue Gene/L is currently the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world, with a peak processing speed of 360 Teraflops. To achieve such power, it harnesses 65,536 processes, and utilizes a scaled down version of Linux as its operating system. The supercomputer was manufactured as a collaboration between IBM, Lawrence Livermore Labs, and the United States Department of Energy. As with the Road Runner, it utilizes a cell based architecture to provide scalability, enabling it to be expanded by adding more processors, without the potential bottlenecks that scaling up might otherwise cause. Blue Gene/L has been used as a cortical similar to simulate a program achieving a complexity equal to 'half a mouse brain.
- Designed by Cray and Sandia Laboratories, Red Storm is currently the fifth fastest supercomputer, and is designed as a parallel processing supercomputer able to perform simulated testing exercises on nuclear weapons stockpiling. This process involves designing replacement components, assisting in testing weapons engineering and physics, and virtual testing of components under variable conditions. The supercomputer is made up of 12,960 AMD Opteron computer nodes, and is able to peak at 124.43 Teraflops. It utilizes a feature-bare version of Linux operating system.
- The Blue Gene/W is housed in IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and is also known as the BGW. The world's sixth fastest supercomputer, it uses 20 racks, each consisting of 1,024 nodes, each possessing 700 MHZ power 440 processors with 512 MB memory, to produce 114 Teraflops. The BGW undertakes science computational activities, including protein folding and biological simulations.
