Roadrunner, the supercomputer from IBM wins the race for fastest supercomputer in the world, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. Jaguar from Cray comes a close second for the second year. The Roadrunner is housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

Roadrunner has maintained its top position gained a year ago. The list of fastest supercomputers in the world is released every June and November. The announcement will be made at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg.  

The supercomputer, Roadrunner, can process 1.105 petaflop/s or quadrillions of floating point operations a second. Jaguar is close on the heels with 1.059 petaflop/s. It is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Some new supercomputers have made it to the top ten, this time.

Jugene, the new IBM computer is at number three with 825.5 teraflop/s or trillions of floating point operations a second. It is installed at Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany.

But some supercomputers are attracted to other international places as well. An IBM BlueGene/P is at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. BlueGene/P has taken 14^th place. Dawning 5000A, placed 15^th, is installed at Shanghai Supercomputer Centre in China.

The threshold to get on the list is getting tighter. The combined power of the 500 supercomputers is 22.6 petaflop/s. It was 16.95 petaflop/s six months ago and 11.7 petaflop/s a year ago. IBM has been overtaken by HP in supplying servers for the supercomputers. IBM leads in overall performance, but HP has a greater chunk of the market at 212 compared to IBM’s 188.

Intel has the lion’s share (at 80%) of processors inside the servers.