Information technologies: List of fastest supercomputers released

The newest TOP500 list of fastest supercomputers in the world has been newly released featuring China’s new Nebulae Supercomputer on the No. 2.

Nebulae (from Latin: “cloud”) which is located at the newly build National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China, achieved 1.271 petaflop/s performance speed, which puts it in the No. 2 spot on the TOP500 behind the American supercomputer Jaguar held on to the No. 1 spot with its record 1.75 PFlop/s. Nebulae is currently the fastest system worldwide in theoretical peak performance at 2.98 PFlop/s.

The Chinese Nebulae has been built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050.

For instance, the performance power of the fastest supercomputer in Russia called “Lomonosov”, located at the Moscow State University, is 350,1 TFlop/s, what is 3,6 times lower than Nebulae’s. "Lomonosov" maintained its positions in the TOP15 with its No. 13.

TOP100 of fastest supercomputers include three Russian supercomputers, forty-six systems located in the USA, five both in the UK and in China.

The newest version of the TOP500 list, which is issued twice yearly, will be formally presented at the ISC’10 (International Supercomputing Conference) Conference (May 30 – June 3, 2010). In the list, released in November 2009 Jaguar won the title of the world’s fastest supercomputer, thus ‘stepped into the shoes’ of IBM Roadrunner.