Top 500 of the world’s fastest supercomputers

The latest Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was released last week during the Supercomputing Conference in Portland, Oregon.

According to this list, Brutus is:

  • the 88th supercomputer in the world
  • the 10th cluster in Europe
  • the 2nd supercomputer in Switzerland (the 1st is the Cray XT5 at CSCS)
  • the most energy efficient general purpose supercomputer in the world (see article in heise.de)

Two other Swiss academic institutions also made it to the Top 500 list:

  • 96: University of Zurich (UZH)
  • 99: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Interestingly, the combined performance of Brutus and the systems at UZH and EPFL (149.2 TF) is almost as high as the Cray XT5 at CSCS (168.7 TF).

NOTE: the performance of Brutus was measured using only Sun X6440 nodes, i.e. using only 6464 out of the cluster’s 8600 cores. The effective performance of Brutus is therefore significantly higher than reported in the Top 500 list.

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2 comments on «Top 500 of the world’s fastest supercomputers»

  1. Thank you for your feedback.

    The information in this article is based on the November 2009 list. It was not updated because we did not report performance results for the June 2010 list. If we had, we estimate that Brutus would still be around rank #88.

    It takes 1-2 weeks to run a full-scale Linpack benchmark on a large cluster like Brutus. We did it in September 2009 as part of the acceptance tests for the new Sun compute nodes, but we cannot afford to do that in a production environment. We prefer to use this CPU time for scientific purposes.
    (Olivier Byrde)

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