China supercomputer in world top 10

update A machine from the Shanghai Supercomputer Center has made it to the top 10 of the world's fastest supercomputers for the first time.

Ranked No. 10, the Dawning 5000A based on AMD's Opteron processor and running Windows HPC, rained on the parade of U.S. supercomputers, which swept the top nine positions of the 32nd Top500 list.

The honor of being the world's fastest supercomputer went to IBM's Roadrunner, which dethroned the BlueGene/L five months ago. The BlueGene/L, also from IBM, took fourth spot in the new rankings.

In the latest results, Cray and IBM dominated the top 10 supercomputer spots while Hewlett-Packard had the most systems--209 of the 500 on the list. Microsoft also delivered a much improved performance over June's Top500 run, when only five systems were Windows-based of which the best performer was ranked No. 23.

With the Dawning Information Industry partnership this time around, the software giant squeezed into the world's fastest 10 for the first time. In a statement released Tuesday night, Microsoft's HPC division director Vince Mendillo said the company has "come a long way in the past four years" to be ranked among the world's fastest supercomputers. "We demonstrated that we have expertise inside Microsoft to lead the integration of a top 10 HPC (high performance computing) system," he added.

Yao Jifeng, technical director of HPC at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, said in the same statement, the center's customers which range from academic institutions to corporations, stand to benefit from its growing partnership with Microsoft.

Overall, Asia's share of supercomputers stood at 47, virtually unchanged from the 48 previously.

Asia's next best performer was the EKA system from HP housed in the Tata Group-affiliated Computational Research Laboratories in India. The machine ranked No. 13, down from its previous spot of No. 8.

China also supplied Asia's third fastest supercomputer--the DeepComp 7000 at the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Science, was ranked 19th.