NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
* 402 systems on TOP500 list of supercomputers feature Intel processors, including three in top 10.
* Intel announces that new HPC-optimised Nehalem-EX processor will be available in 2010.
* Beta program for Intel’s Ct technology will be available by end of 2009.
AUCKLAND, 16 November 2009 – More than four out of every five supercomputers on the TOP500 list are powered by Intel®
processors. Intel Corporation today announced new technologies that will better equip scientists, researchers and
engineers with the computing power to speed up science and engineering projects such as the development of new drugs and
climate change research.
In the first half of 2010 Intel Corporation will launch a new High Performance Computing (HPC) optimised version of its
forthcoming processor codenamed Nehalem-EX. The 6-core chip will run at higher frequencies than 8-core versions of the
Nehalem-EX processors and will offer advantages on some HPC workloads. Customers will benefit from greater memory
bandwidth and capacity compared to today’s solutions, and will be able to build supercomputers with up to 256 such
chips; a supercomputer cluster may contain many such machines.
Intel also announced that a beta program for Intel’s Ct technology will be available by the end of 2009. Intel Ct
technology makes parallel programming in the C and C++ languages easier by automatically parallelising code across
multi-core and many-core processors. Additional information is available at http://www.intel.com/software/data-parallel.
The 34th edition of the TOP500 list shows that a record-breaking 402 of the world’s top 500 systems have Intel
processors inside, with increased adoption in computers designed for geophysics, financial calculations and scientific
research. According to the list, Intel chips power 20 of the top 50 systems. Systems using Intel Xeon® quad-core
processors lead the list, holding 379 spots.
Only months after its arrival, the Intel Xeon 5500 series processor, previously codenamed Nehalem-EP, is already significantly impacting the HPC community, powering 21 systems in the top
100 supercomputers.
“With the industry’s rapid adoption of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series processor, Intel has more systems than ever
on the Linpack benchmark-based TOP500 list,” said Richard Dracott, general manager of Intel’s High Performance Computing
Group. “We’re even more elated that customers are choosing our Xeon processor products not only for Linpack scores, but
also because of the exceptional application performance delivered across a wide range of real-world workloads found in
energy exploration, science research and 3-D internet.”
The Xeon processor 5500 series is playing a pivotal role in supercomputers used for scientific research and discovery.
NASA and SGI have added servers containing 2,304 energy-efficient Xeon 5500 series processors increasing the
“brainpower” of the Pleiades supercomputer by 35 percent to handle NASA’s commitment to advance global climate change
research. Pleiades now boasts a total of 14,080 Intel Xeon processors.
At number ten on the list is the Sandia National Laboratories and Sun Microsystems supercomputer called Red Sky. Red Sky
features more than 10,000 Intel Xeon 5500 series processors.
The semi-annual TOP500 list of supercomputers is the work of Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier
and Horst Simon of the United States Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and
Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. The complete report is available at http://http://www.top500.org.
ENDS