IBM has climbed back to the top of the global supercomputer list with Sequoia,a 1,572,864 core BlueGene/Q system installed at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory-which has achieved 16.32Pflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.
BlueGene/Q uses IBM's own 18 core 64bit Power Architecture processor,built on a 45nm silicon-on-insulator process.
This pushed previous leader Fujitsu's K Computer in Kobe into second place at 10.51Pflop/s from its 705,024 SPARC64 cores.
Mira,a new BlueGene/Q,this time at the US Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois,debuted at number three with 8.15Pflop/s using 786,432 cores.
Europe comes in next,with SuperMUC,an IBM iDataplex system installed at Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Germany.
Another German machine,the JuQUEEN BlueGene/Q at Forschungszentrum Juelich,is number eight.
The made-in-Europe machine is France's Bull supercomputer at number nine,made from Intel Xeon processors.
The UK comes in at 13,with a 114,688 core 1.2Pflop Blue Gene/Q called Blue Joule at the government's Daresbury lab,significantly behind Italy's 1.7Pflop/s BlueGene/Q system installed at CINECA at number seven.
Top500,the list of the top 500 supercomputers,is compiled every six moths.
According to its compilers,"a total of 372 systems[74.4%]are now using Intel processors,down from 384 systems on the last list.Intel is now followed by the AMD Opteron family with 63 systems,same as in the in the previous list.The share of IBM Power processors has increased from 49 to 58 systems".
58 systems use accelerators or co-processors(up from 39 six months ago)to accelerate computation.
53 of these,including the Chinese systems at numbers five and 10,and the Japanese Tsubame 2.0 system at 14 use NVIDIA graphics processors.
Of the remainder,two use Cell processors,two use ATI Radeon and one uses Intel's many-cored Xeon Phi(re-named from MIC by the Intel last week).
IBM made 42.6%of the systems,HP made 27.6%,then come Cray,Appro,SGI and Bull follow with 5.4,3.6,3.2 and 3.2%respectively.
"IBM remains the clear leader with 47.5%of total installed performance.HP is second with 10.2%.Due to the impressive performance of the K Computer,Fujitsu follows closely in the third spot with 9.9%."
The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim,Germany;Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory;and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee,Knoxville.
