IBM and the Los Alamos National Labs have landed at the very summit of the Top500 list with a score of 1.026 petaflop/s:

The new No. 1 system, built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and named “Roadrunner,” by LANL after the state bird of New Mexico achieved performance of 1.026 petaflop/s—becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach this milestone. At the same time, Roadrunner is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500.

Roadrunner made waves a couple of weeks ago, and not just because it was the first to cross the petaflop milestone. Also helping to garner interest is its new, energy-efficient architecture that blends the blades powered by Cell processors (the technology behind the Playstation 3) and Opterons from AMD.

And just in time too, as the Top500 group is now also measuring power consumption. Roadrunner consumes 2345.50 KW, slightly more (in relative terms) than the DOE's second place BlueGene L, which consumes 2329.60 KW and has a performance rating of 478.2 teraflops--less than half of the first place winner.

Some more interesting observations on that front include...

• Most energy efficient supercomputers are based on:
  • IBM QS22 Cell processor blades up to 488 Mflop/s/Watt,
    
  • IBM BlueGene/P systems up to 371 Mflop/s/Watt

• Intel Harpertown quad-core blades are catching up fast:
  • IBM BladeCenter HS21with low-power processors (L5420) up to 265 Mflop/s/Watt
    
  • SGI Altix ICE 8200EX Xeon nodes (E5472) with high efficient Linpack up to 240 Mflop/s/Watt
    
  • Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL2x220 with double density blades up to 227 Mflop/s/Watt

• These systems are already ahead of BlueGene/L (up to 210 Mflop/s/Watt).

The group also speculates that power consumption rises as rank drops because newer, more efficient technologies are usually found at the top end.

Another observation made by the group is that HP is starting to challenge IBM for the total number of systems on the list. Last time, HP had 166 sytems on the list versus IBM's 232. This time, the gap narrows with 183 spots for HP versus IBM's 210.

IBM, however, remains far and away the performance leader, accounting for "48 percent of installed total performance." HP comes second with 22.4 percent.

Other systems near the top include Argonne National Laboratory's Blue Gene/P at 450 teraflops (3rd place); University of Texas Advanced Computing Center's Sunblade-powered Ranger at 326 teraflops (4th place); and Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Cray XT4 Jaguar at 205 teraflops (5th place).

Congrats to all!