Latest Top 500 Supercomputers List Published

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Twice a year, Top500 updates its list of the world's top 500 performing super computer. The latest results were just published, and the United States holds five of the top ten slots. Other countries with top performing supercomputers include Japan, Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Of the top ten supercomputers in the world, IBM created six. Cray, famous for early supercomputers finds its top two performers ranked tenth and eleventh.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory owns today’s number one supercomputer. It should come as no surprise that the laboratory is a premier research and development institution for science and technology applied to the national security of the United States. It is responsible for ensuring that the nation’s nuclear weapons remain safe, secure, and reliable. LLNL also applies its expertise to prevent the spread and use of weapons of mass destruction and strengthen homeland security.

Livermore's supercomputer is comprised of 65536 (or 2 to the 16th power) PowerPC 440 700 MHz processors. The processors are arranged and managed by IBM's eServer Blue Gene Solution. In the supercomputer benchmark program Linpack, it pumped out a maximum of 136,800 gigaflops. The gigaflop is a measure of computing speed equal to one billion floating-point operations per second, and a floating-point operation is an arithmetic operation performed on floating-point numbers. This means that the Livermore National Laboratory supercomputer can perform 136,800,000,000,000 arithmetic operations every second!