For those of us not in the know, "supercomputer" conjures up few images. One might be the 30 Rock episode where Jenna mistakes a prop from the failed 1975 series Supercomputer for creepy head page Donny. Or possibly a giant Star-Trek-like room emitting boops and beeps. Those in the know, like Horst Gietl, an executive consultant for the International Supercomputing Conference, will tell you that a supercomputer is simply a computer that has the most advanced processing speed and capability right now.
The computer you're using to read this is more powerful than supercomputers of yore. But today's supercomputers are so fast, the cool kids call them "slow." Take the processor in a laptop, multiply it by thousands, stack them in racks, link them through a lightning-fast network and you have a supercomputer.
"If an application on your laptop needs years to produce valuable results, then a supercomputer may solve the same problem in minutes," Gietl says. They have the ability to handle massive amounts of data for climate analysis, molecular modeling and even nuclear explosion simulation. This week, the annual list of the world's 500 most powerful machines was announced at the ISC in Dresden, Germany. Here are the top ten:
10. SGI Altix ICE 8200EX
The SGI Altix system in Pau, France, has a capacity of 106.1 teraflops (one teraflop = one trillion operations per second). This supercomputer is run by Total Exploration Production and is the largest system housed with an industrial customer, according to Top500.org. Total is a gas and oil company that uses its supercomputer to do seismic depth imaging in order to locate underground hydrocarbon reservoirs. The company reports that the massive heat from the computer is being used to warm some of the building at the center.
9. BlueGene/P at IDRIS
The BlueGene/P Solution system at the Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique in Orsay, France, is just one of many IBM systems on the list. IDRIS works in partnership with another supercomputer center in Montpellier to offer its capabilities to the national scientific community.
8. EKA
This is the second year a supercomputer in India has broken the top 10. EKA, which means number one in Sanskrit, runs on a Hewlett-Packard system at Computational Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of Tata Sons in Pune, India. Tata Group is the largest conglomerate in India, bringing in $55 billion annually. CRL is focused entirely on high-performance computing. EKA's power makes it ideal for molecular simulations, fluid dynamics computations and crash simulations.
7. Encanto
This system, at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC) in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, was built by SGI. According to an article in the United Kingdom's Register earlier this year, Encanto was being housed at an Intel facility (Intel made most of the processors in the Top500 list). Apparently, politicians in New Mexico are considering making the 133.2 teraflops supercomputer available for businesses and academic institutions to rent.
6. JUGENE
This computer, at the Jülich Research Centre (FZJ for short in German), in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany is yet another that runs on IBM's BlueGene system. Back in the day, Jülich had three nuclear reactors for research, but they have all since been closed. Now the center has shifted its focus to broader scientific subjects and is participating in several grid computing projects in the European Union.
