Cray's Jaguar tops IBM's Roadrunner for fastest supercomputer

Sitting back at No. 2 on the Top500 list of supercomputers for more than a year, Jaguar overtook IBM's "Roadrunner" according to the twice-yearly list that will be unveiled Tuesday at the SC09 Conference in Portland, Ore.

Jaguar beat out the competition by showing it can process 1.75 petflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. IBM's Roadrunner was pushed back to No. 2 by posting a processing speed of 1.04 petaflop/s, a dip from the 1.105 petaflop/s it reached in a June 2009 test. The slower performance this time around is apparently due to a repartitioning of the system.

Just as the last time the list was released, the Top500 list is made up mostly of Hewlett-Packard and IBM computers. HP accounted for 210 of this year's 500, and IBM 185. In terms of processors in use, Intel still enjoys the lion's share, with 80 percent. The most popular operating system is Linux, with 90 percent of the Top500.

For more, read "Jaguar supercomputer races past Roadrunner in Top500" from CNET News.