Silicon Graphics Inc and its Cray unit continue to dominate the world’s Top 500 Supercomputing Sites, a list published every six months by the Universities of Tennessee and Mannheim. SGI keeps 35% (182) of installed systems and 48% of installed performance for the first half of this year.
SGI accounts for seven of the top ten sites although the largest system is Intel Corp’s 2.1 Tflops ASCI Red monster with 9,472 CPUs. SGI’s 6144 processor ASCI Blue is number two on the list at 1.6Tflops. An SGI US government site is number three at 0.89Tflops with 1,084 processors and Hitachi’s SR8000 at the University of Tokyo is fourth largest at 0.87Tflops with 128 processors. Hitachi brings Japan back into the top ten.
IBM Corp leapfrogs Sun Microsystems Inc into the number two spot overall with 188 systems, up from 104, and has 19% of installed performance. Sun systems decrease from 127 to 95; it has 8% of performance. There are 194 new machines on the list in the last six months.
0.5Tflop is the entry point to the top 500 list with seven reaching above 1Tflop performance. Out of the top ten, two systems are in the UK, one in Japan and seven in the US. Shared nothing MPP machines account for 358 machines, up from 327, while traditional vector systems decline from 65 to 58. There are five network workstations on the list, up from 2 six months ago. 448 machines are US-produced, up from 444. 241 are commercial machines, up from 207; 123 are for research, down from 137; and 71 are academic, down from 90. รก
