Continuing to hold its place as leader of the pack, for a record-setting tenth consecutive time, an IBM system has achieved the number-one position in the ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The IBM computer built for the "roadrunner project" at Los Alamos National Lab-the first in the world to operate at speeds faster than one quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop)-remains the world speed champion.
Roadrunner uses the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora operating systems. Overall, various distributions of Linux represented a 94% share of the operating systems used by supercomputers on the TOP500 List.
IBM has also announced its intent to break the exaflop barrier, and has created a research 'collaboratory' in Dublin, in partnership with the Industrial Development Agency (IDA) of Ireland, which is focused on both achieving exascale computing and making it useful to business. An exaflop is a million trillion calculations per second, which is 1,000 times faster than today's petaflop-class systems.
The latest semi-annual ranking of the World's TOP500 Supercomputer Sites was released during the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Results show the IBM system at Los Alamos National lab, which clocked in at 1.105 petaflops, is nearly three times as energy-efficient as the number-two computer to maintain similar levels of petascale computing power. IBM's number-one system performs 444.9 megaflops per watt of energy compared only 154.2 megaflops per watt for the number-two system.
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