Report: IBM Leadership in Supercomputing Reaches All Time High.Business/High-Tech Editors Supercomputing 2000 Conference DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 3, 2000 New Study Says IBM SP (IBM Scalable POWER) A family of massively parallel (MPP) computer systems from IBM based on its RS/6000 (pSeries) models that incorporate various POWER and PowerPC CPUs. First introduced in 1993, SP configurations support from two to 512 processors. Supercomputer is World's Most Popular Ever; IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) Eyes Supercomputing's Holy Grail of 100 Trillion Operations per Second An independent study released today names IBM the world leader in supercomputing, marking a milestone for the company's SP supercomputer, now the most successful system in supercomputing history. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. the TOP500 List of Supercomputers, IBM produced 215 of the world's top 500 fastest computers, its presence on the list expanding at record proportions while competitor Sun Microsystems' presence dwindles to less than half of the IBM number. IBM also announced that it is now targeting a holy grail of supercomputing -- the construction of a computer system capable of 100 trillion calculations per second -- and said that it is confident of achieving the monumental task using existing SP supercomputing technology. Today's list also marks the first time that other IBM systems besides the SP have attained a TOP500 ranking. The company's "Blue Hammer" clusters featuring S80 UNIX systems and Intel-based Linux cluster systems emerged today in record numbers on the list, evidence that IBM's use of supercomputing technology in these new products is paying off. Published by researchers at the University of Tennessee The University of Tennessee (UT), sometimes called the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT Knoxville or UTK), is the flagship institution of the statewide land-grant University of Tennessee public university system in the American state of Tennessee. and the University of Mannheim The University of Mannheim is one of the younger German universities. Though it sees its roots back to the Kurpfälzische Akademie der Wissenschaften of 1763, the actual university was founded in 1907 as college for economics. in Germany, the TOP500 List tracks the use of supercomputers by universities, government labs and a wide array of businesses. In addition to providing the largest number of the world's fastest supercomputers, IBM tops the list with the world's fastest computer -- the 12.3 teraflop (unit) teraflop - 10^12 flops. Intel beat Hitachi to the record of 1.06 teraflops, on 04 Dec 1996, unofficially in Beverton, Oregon, using 7264 Pentium Pro chips. ASCI White See ASC White. system -- and the world's fastest Linux system based at the University of New Mexico The University of New Mexico (UNM) is a public university in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was founded in 1889. It also offers multiple bachelor's, master's, doctoral, and professional degree programs in all areas of the arts, sciences, and engineering. , capable of 375 Gigaflops (GIGA FLoating point OPerations per Second) One billion floating point operations per second. See FLOPS. (unit) gigaflops - (GFLOPS) One thousand million (10^9) floating point operations per second. . IBM also leads in aggregate power with a total of 37.3718 teraflops. IBM supercomputers possess nearly 4 times the processing power of Sun's total of 9.5326 teraflops. One teraflop is a trillion calculations per second.
TOP500 List Leaders
Total Systems Total Processing Power
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IBM 215 37.3718 teraflops
Sun Microsystems 92 9.5326 teraflops
The latest TOP500 List continues to underscore an important trend: the emerging number of supercomputers used in business applications. Nearly half of the systems on the TOP500 -- 245 -- are used for business applications. Of the elite top ten business supercomputers in the world, eight are IBM RS/6000 SPs. The use of supercomputers by commercial businesses has increased dramatically since "Deep Blue," an IBM RS/6000 SP, defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov Garry Kimovich Kasparov (IPA: [ˈgarʲə ˈkʲɪməvʲə̈ʨ kʌˈsparəf]; Russian: in 1997. In fact, over the past two years more than half of IBM sales of new supercomputers have been to customers that use them as commercial Web-hosting servers. More and more businesses are recognizing the RS/6000 SP's power and virtually unlimited scalability, traits that have been utilized for years by the scientific and technical communities for groundbreaking work in forecasting weather, biomedical research Biomedical research (or experimental medicine), in general simply known as medical research, is the basic research or applied research conducted to aid the body of knowledge in the field of medicine. and nuclear test simulation. "IBM has extended its leadership in supercomputing by betting on pervasive instead of specialized or niche technologies," said Rod Adkins, general manager, IBM Web Servers. "In fact, SP supercomputer software designed to manage large numbers of computers in parallel ran the largest Web site in history, handling 1.2 millions hits per minute at the Sydney Olympics. IBM will continue to deliver the processing power and deep computing technology necessary to help solve the most complex challenges of our time." Thousands of businesses, organizations and research facilities throughout the world are trusting the RS/6000 SP to run their most demanding, mission-critical applications. From unlocking the secrets of disease and the common cold to enabling breakthroughs in nuclear simulation, weather forecasting, drug design and geological research, the RS/6000 SP marks the next generation of computational power capabilities that will help answer the most complex problems of our time. The "TOP500 Supercomputing Sites" list is compiled and published by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee and Erich Strohmaier and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany). The entire list can be viewed at www.top500.org. For more information about RS/6000 systems and the AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) IBM's Unix-based operating system which runs on its Intellistation workstations and pSeries, p5, iSeries and i5 server families. operating system, see the RS/6000 home page at http://www.rs6000.ibm.com. IBM, RS/6000, SP and AIX are registered trademarks or trademarks of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. UNIX UNIX Operating system for digital computers, developed by Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in 1969. It was initially designed for a single user (the name was a pun on the earlier operating system Multics). is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company, Limited. Other company, product and service names, which may be denoted by a double asterisk (**) may be trademarks or service marks of others. |
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