IBM ESERVER LEADS SUPERCOMPUTER LIST WITH MORE THAN 300 SYSTEMS.

IDC Ranking Also Shows That IBM eServer p690 Outperforms Sun 15K And HP Superdome, While Using Half As Many Processors

IBM has the most systems of any vendor on a new list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, nearly doubling the number of machines posted by the second place company -- the combined Hewlett-Packard/Compaq. The "Balanced Rating Benchmark" from International Data Corporation (IDC) also determined that a single 32-way IBM eServer p690 server is more powerful than the Sun Fire 15K and Hewlett-Packard Superdome, while using only half the number of processors.

The IDC list contains 304 IBM eServer systems, compared with 171 for Hewlett-Packard/Compaq and 89 for Sun Microsystems.

"IBM's success in the supercomputing space is the result of a simple philosophy -- our supercomputers are built to handle the broad spectrum of supercomputing applications for both commercial and technical environments," said David Gelardi, director, IBM eServer benchmarking. "As more businesses turn to supercomputers to handle large data mining and other substantial applications, IBM will be positioned for continued leadership in this important space."

The IBM supercomputers on the list range from single-box systems to massive clusters of 512 computers. At the single-box level, the performance leadership of the 32-way IBM eServer p690 over the 72-way Sun Fire 15K and 64-way HP Superdome machines illustrates the superiority of IBM's game-changing design. The IBM eServer p690 is fueled by the POWER4 microprocessor, the first "server on a chip," containing two one-gigahertz-plus processors, a high-bandwidth system switch, a large memory cache and I/O interface.

The IDC list echoes the results of the TOP500 List of Supercomputers, published twice each year by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee and Erich Strohmaier and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany). In the most recent TOP500 List, IBM systems accounted for 160 of the world's 500 most powerful high performance computers -- more than any other vendor.

For the future, IBM has announced that it is building Blue Gene/L -- a 200 teraflop supercomputer based on technology under development by IBM Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A teraflop equals a trillion calculations per second.