IBM Unveils World’s Fastest Computer

World’s major computer manufacturers have been battling it out to build the most powerful computer on Earth. Any guesses for the world’s fastest computer? Well, the Big Blue virtuosos have made it again. It has smashed all the existing records ending up 20 times more powerful than the former. With speeds of up to 1.105 petaflops - 1.105 quadrillion calculations per second - IBM’s Roadrunner is the world’s fastest electronic brain. Roadrunner topped the  biannual Top500 list, released Tuesday at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference. IBM made two new entries in the top 10 list - the BlueGene/P called Jugene and the Juropa.

The Jugene floated operations at a speed of 825.5 teraflops and Juropa touched a 274.8 teraflops. Both of these were far behind the reigning numero uno Roadrunner that achieved a stupendous 1.105 petaflops. Cray XT5 Jaguar system ranked second followed at 1.059 petaflops. Jugene was the third fastest. Jugene and Juropa have been build from Novascale and Sun Microsystems Sun Blade x6048 server at Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany.

The two German-based systems were the only supercomputer in the latest top 10 not based in United States. In the Top500, 291 were based in United States.

Another giant manufacturer Hewlett-Packard had a narrow lead over IBM in terms of the numbers of system listed in Top500. However, IBM systems held the top position for overall performance. The quad-core based systems formed the highest numbers in the Top500, figuring 383 systems.

The entry-level computers in the list achieved up to 17.1 teraflops on the Linpack benchmark. The combined performance of the 500 systems hiked to 22.6 petaflops, as compared to 16.95 petaflops six months ago.

Out of the total 399 systems were using Intel processors slightly more than that six months ago. Their IBM pocessors were second most commonly used line of processors with 55 systems, down from 60. Following them was Opteron line from Advanced Micro Devices(AMD) which accounted for 43 systems.