IBM Roadrunner retains top supercomputer crown

IBM's Roadrunner is the fastest supercomputer once again

IBM's Roadrunner system has once again been verified as the fastest supercomputer on the planet.

The computing cluster at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore labs retained the lead on the Top 500 supercomputer list, despite challenges from several new systems.

Roadrunner is capable of 1.105 petaflops, or 1.105 quadrillion floating point operations per second. A quadrillion is a thousand million million.

Second on the list was the Cray XT5 cluster at Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee. This is the second time that the Oak Ridge system has taken the number two slot.

Although the top two spots were unchanged from the previous ranking in November 2008, several new systems appeared within the top 25, adding new facilities and locations to the rankings.

In third place was the new IBM BlueGene cluster installed at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) facility in Germany. The system is one of two at the FZJ facility to appear in the top ten, and is one of three supercomputer systems to debut in the top ten this year.

Also making a debut in the top 15 was the new supercomputing system at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. The supercomputing cluster came in 14th overall and is the fastest system outside the US and Germany.

The two fastest systems in the UK are IBM Power 575 clusters, both located at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading. They appeared at 25 and 26 in the list.