IBM Technology
Gains in Fastest
Supercomputers
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


A new list of the world's fastest supercomputers shows the growing
popularity of technology from International Business Machines Corp. to
solve the toughest scientific problems.

The ranking also shows wider use of Intel Corp.'s Xeon microprocessor,
particularly for systems called clusters that use components that
evolved from personal computers. But the number of systems on the list
using Intel's high-end Itanium chip declined to 46 from 84 in the past
year. Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron chip was used in 55
machines, up from 29 a year ago.

Those are among the trends in the latest ranking of the 500 biggest
systems in the world, issued twice a year by researchers at the
University of Tennessee, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the
University of Mannheim, Germany. Systems are ranked by how fast they
complete a set of calculations.

Supercomputers, a name applied to the biggest machines, have expanded
from military and scientific applications to play major roles in
commercial fields such as product design and film production. In one
sign of their popularity, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates is
scheduled to speak at a supercomputer conference in Seattle Monday.

Such systems also are a matter of national pride. After Japan's NEC
Corp. took the No.1 spot several years ago, companies and U.S.
government agencies mounted an effort to regain the lead.

A collaboration between IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
helped to produce BlueGene/L, a supercomputer used to simulate nuclear
reactions. That system, recently expanded, reinforced its No.1 position
in the latest list by executing 280.6 trillion calculations per second,
doubling its own speed record.

IBM, besides selling more supercomputers than any other vendor, more
than doubled the number of Power chips used in systems on the list. Some
327,622 of those chips were used in 73 supercomputers, including five of
the 10 fastest machines. By comparison, Intel boosted the number of Xeon
chips used by 57% to 243,112, in 287 systems, with one Xeon-based system
and one Itanium machine among the top 10.

BlueGene/L is based around a variant of the Power line that combines two
microprocessors along with communications functions, allowing chips to
exchange data with each other quickly. There are 131,072 of those chips
in the Livermore system alone.

Jack Dungarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who helped
prepare the list, predicted that the largest machines will begin using
thousands of such multibrained chips, each with up to 64
microprocessors. He also expects companies in China and Japan to mount
strong efforts to take the world speed crown.

Besides helping to fund hardware development, the U.S. government should
respond to the new trend in system design and support research in how to
program them, said David Patterson, president of the Association for
Computing Machinery, a trade organization, and a professor of computer
science at the University of California. "We desperately need
investments in how to use thousands of processors," he said.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

Don Clark
Wall St. Journal
415 765-6115
415 250-1320 cell
don.clark@wsj.com