Positioned at number four, this system was built by SGI and is installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, US. It consists of 48 Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 shared memory multi-processor systems. Each system has 128 250 MHz processors, giving a total of 6,144 processors. Total memory is 1.5 terabytes, while total storage space is 76 terabytes. It has a measured maximal performance of 1,608 GFlops, and a peak performance of 3,072 GFlops.

Hitachi SR8000-F1/112

Installed at Leibniz Rechenzentrum—a department in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences—Munich, Germany, this machine is used for academic research in areas like physics and geophysics, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, engineering, and software engineering. It has a measured performance of 1,035 GFlops and a peak performance of 1,344 GFlops. This is a RISC-based distributed memory multi-processor system, and can support both parallel and vector processing. The system has 112 processors, about 1 terabyte of main memory and 10 terabytes of storage space. The machine is supposed to be among the most powerful supercomputers in Europe.

Cray T3E 1200

Installed at the US Army HPC Research Center, Minneapolis, US, this machine does 892 GFlops, and has a peak performance of 1300.8 GFlops. It’s used for research in defense technology. It’s a distributed memory MIMD system, and has 1, 084 processors. The system has 557 GB of memory, and is the largest Cray T3E system in the world.

For a list of the current top 500 supercomputers, visit www.top500.org

A parallel development has been to use Beowulf clusters to build systems that are powerful, but not costly. Two such notable efforts were the Klat2project at the University of Kentucky, UK, and the Bunyip project in Australia. The Bunyip, in fact, won the Gordon Bell prize for price-performance ratio for a real supercomputing application.

Klat2

An acronym for Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed2, this was the second Beowulf cluster built at the University of Kentucky using Athlon processors. Beowulfs, in simple terms, are clusters of PCs that are configured to work together as a single supercomputer. Beowulfs are built out of commodity hardware components, run free-software OSs like Linux or FreeBSD, and are interconnected by a high-speed network.

Klat2’s configuration consisted of 64 nodes, plus two "hot spare" nodes. The latter, along with an additional switch layer, are used for fault tolerance and system-level I/O. Each node contained one 700 MHz AMD Athlon processor, and dual-fan heat sink, 128 MB PC100 SDRAM, an FIC SD11 motherboard, four RealTek-based Fast Ethernet NICs, a floppy drive (for boot floppy, as there were no hard disks on the nodes), and 300W power supply and mid-tower case with an extra fan. Besides, it had 10 Fast Ethernet 32-way switches (31 ports, plus one uplink port), more than 264 Cat5 Fast Ethernet cables, and ran Red Hat Linux 6 with updated kernel. One distinguishing feature of the cluster is that while most clusters use high-performance gigabit networks to interconnect PCs, Klat2 used 100 Mbps Ethernet hardware in a new configuration called Flat Neighborhood Network.

The nodes contained no video cards, keyboards, or mice.

With this configuration, Klat2 clocked a maximal performance of 64 GFlops on a 32-bit ScaLAPACK.