Intel in 75% of Top 500 Supercomputers

Intel is proud to announce their processors can be found in 75 percent of world's fastest supercomputers, up from 70.8% in November 2007:

The just released TOP 500 Supercomputing ranking list verifies that the wide majority of today's systems are based on Intel® multi-core processors and able to evaluate and calculate large volumes of data and complex algorithms very rapidly. 375 or 75 percent of the ranked supercomputers are based on Intel® processors -- more than ever before. In the year 2000, only four – yes four – systems were based on Intel architecture, illustrating just how rapidly the leading processor architecture for supercomputers has been embraced. Intel's push into quad-core based systems is also well represented. In just over one and a half years since the first quad core processor, more than half (257 systems) now contain four-brained Intel chips.

You can view the list of the fastest supercomputers in June 2008 at Top500. This time the top spot is taken by the new Roadrunner supercomputer of the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, this system has a performance of 1.026 petaFLOPS and is one of the most energy efficient systems in the list.

The Roadrunner system is based on the IBM QS22 blades which are built with advanced versions of the processor in the Sony PlayStation 3, displaces the reigning IBM BlueGene/L system at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Blue Gene/L, with a performance of 478.2 teraflop/s (trillions of floating point operations per second) is now ranked No. 2 after holding the top position since November 2004.

Another interesting observation is that 283 of the top 500 supercomputers use quad-core processors, dual-core processors are used by 203 systems and only 11 systems still use single-core processors. The 9-core Cell processor is used by 3 systems.