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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Platforms:
More Than Half Of Top 500 Supercomputers Running On Intel
More than half of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world are now based on
Intel Itanium or Xeon processors, reflecting the trend away from deploying
proprietary, one-of-a-kind supercomputers toward a building-block approach
that takes advantage of standards-based, off-the-shelf components to build
these powerful machines.
Intel Corp's platforms, whose influence in supercomputing has been gaining
ground rapidly in recent years, laid claim to 286 sites in the Top500 list.
Three years ago, Intel had only three systems on the list. Intel Itanium
processors are the foundation for the second-ranked new "Thunder" system at
the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) near
San Francisco and also the fastest "cluster" computer. The system took only
five months to build and deploy.
Intel-based systems now hold four of the top 10 spots on the list. In addition
to the LLNL system, Intel processors powers systems at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (fifth place on the Top500), which is based on
2,500 Intel Xeon processors; Institute of Physical and Chemical Res.(seventh
place), which uses 2,048 Intel Itanium 2 processors; and Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory (ninth place), which employs 1,936 Intel Itanium 2
processors.
"Intel architecture's rapid rise in supercomputing reflects the acceptance of
the benefits of Intel's standards-based building-block approach with its
benefits of reduced design time and cost effectiveness versus the proprietary
methods," said Abhi Talwalker, Intel vice president and general manager of the
Enterprise Platforms Group. "Using off-the-shelf components, supercomputers
that used to take years to build can now be constructed in a matter of months
with Intel Itanium or Xeon processors at a fraction of the cost. It's a trend
that hasn't been missed by the industry as supercomputing, once the sole
province of well-funded scientific pursuits, is now within the realm of a wide
variety of disciplines."
Intel Itanium 2 processors have seen strong adoption in supercomputers this
past year, more than tripling from 19 systems in June 2003 to 61 in the
current Top500 report. Intel Xeon processors also showed healthy growth from
100 systems a year ago to 225 in the same period.
Intel has two server architectures, which makes up approximately 85 percent of
the server market segment share. The Itanium 2 processor family is targeted at
business critical enterprise servers and technical computing clusters while
the Intel Xeon processor family is broadly used for general purpose IT
infrastructure.
World's Fastest Cluster Computer
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's supercomputer, codenamed Thunder,
took over the number two spot on the Top500 in the new report. Configured with
4,096 Intel Itanium 2 processors, the Thunder supercomputer is world's most
powerful cluster system. It is capable of 19.94 teraflops of performance.
Thunder helps support LLNL's national security and science programs in fields
such as inertial confinement fusion, materials science, structural mechanics,
electromagnetics, atmospheric science, biology and seismology.
"Using Intel Itanium 2 building blocks, Thunder was constructed in just five
months," said Mark Seager, assistant department head at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, and program leader responsible for platforms. "Taking the
standards-based approach with Intel components cut the time to get the system
online, and satisfied a number of other factors that were critical to our
needs, including price/performance, cooling, reliability and investment
protection with the future processor upgrades."
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