The fastest computers in the world, including some IBM Rochester-made machines, mostly held their positions between June to November.
When the twice-annual Top 500 supercomputer list was unveiled Monday, the top five rankings were unchanged from June.
That means IBM's Sequoia Blue Gene/Q still is in the number three spot and Mira BlueGene/Q based at the Dept. of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory is holding on to fifth place.
All Blue Genes are designed, manufactured and tested in Rochester, according to IBM
A computer built by China's National University of Defense Technology, Milkyway2, kept its hold on the top spot by running at 33.86 petaflops, which translates to quadrillions of calculations per second. Cray's Titan at the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a distant second reporting a speed of 17.59 petaflops.
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While the numbers are holding pretty steady between the June and November lists, the 2013 rankings are much faster than in 2012.
Sequoia, which is right behind Titan with 17.7 petaflops, was number one on the June 2012 list with a 16.3 speed. That's less than half the speed of the current leader, China's Milkyway2.
IBM still has five of the top ten computers as it did in June. However, the other three -- JUQUEEN BlueGene/Q, Vulcan-BlueGene/Q, and SuperMUC -- were bumped down a notch from seventh, eighth and ninth to eighth, ninth and tenth by a Texas computer called Stampede. The computer based at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas in Austin muscled its way onto the list in the seventh spot.
In all, IBM has 164 computers on the Top 500 list second only to Hewlett-Packard, which had 196. Cray was a distant third with 48.
The rankings might not be dramatically different on this list, but the speed differences from 2008 are extreme.
That was the year that IBM's Roadrunner became the first machine in the world to break the one petaflop speed barrier. This list has 31 systems running at speeds of beyond a petaflop.
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Top 10 fastest computers in the world
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1. MilkyWay-2, China
2. Titan, Cray,
3. Sequoia BlueGene/Q, IBM
4. K computer, Fujitsu
5. Mira BlueGene/Q, IBM,
6. Piz Daint, Cray
7. Stampede, University of Texas
8. JUQUEEN BlueGene/Q, IBM
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9. Vulcan BlueGene/Q, IBM
10. SuperMUC, IBM
– November TOP 500 List
