The Top 500 list covering the world’s fastest supercomputers has been updated for the second time this year and after dominating the list many times over IBM’s Roadrunner has been surpassed by Jaguar. The supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been second to Roadrunner on the last two updates but on the new list it has raised the bar to a whole new level. Roadrunner that still performs a whopping 1042 teraflop/s is not even close to Jaguar squeezing out maximal 1759 teraflop/s.
Jaguar Cray XT5 in its current shape is more than twice as fast as the world’s third fastest supercomputer, Kraken, which achieves 832 teraflop/s on a good day.
When you look closer at the hardware used by the different supercomputers on the list things get even more interesting.
Even if 80.4 percent of all computers on the latest top500 list use Intel processors, Cray and Jaguar use AMD’s Opteron processors. The heart of the system is AMD’s pretty fresh hexa-core Istanbul processor offering 10.6 gigaflops per processor at 2,6GHz .
More information on Jaguar and the remaining 499 supercomputers can be found at top500.org.
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