CyberNation India: Implications of Linux Supercomputers for AMD, Intel

“The growing number of Linux supercomputers is evidence of a
significant shift for both the academic and commercial communities.
Twice each year since 1993, the TOP500 (www.top500.org)
supercomputer organization has published a list of the 500 most
powerful computer systems based on the LINPACK performance
benchmark that measures performance among all classes of
supercomputers. While the Hewlett-Packard Superdome and
AlphaServer, IBM SP and Sun Microsystems 15K systems continue to
dominate the Top500 supercomputing list, there is also an increase
in the number of Linux clusters. The highest ranking Linux system,
at No. 35 on the Top500 list, is the University of Heidelberg Linux
Cluster System (HELICS) running 825 Gigaflops and is based on AMD
Athlon.

“The HELICS supercomputer performs scientific research in the
fields of reactive flows, human genome decryption, bioinformatics
and applied physics at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific
Computing (ICSC). In addition, the Tokyo Institute of Technology
Presto III Cluster located in Tokyo, Japan also runs on AMD Athlon
and ranks at No. 47. This is the first time AMD processor-based
systems have earned places in the top ten percent of the TOP500
rankings. Another implication of the Top500 rankings is that it
demonstrates that a single university lab can achieve terascale
performance (a teraflop is equivalent to one trillion floating
point operations per second)…”

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