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INTEL CHIPS NOW POWER FASTEST COMPUTERS

Intel chips were the most frequently utilized processors in supercomputers over the past six months, according to researchers who track the world's fastest computers.

According to the latest survey, 189 of the world's top 500 supercomputers run on Intel processors, up from 119 systems the previous six months. The Top500 list will be released to coincide with the opening of Supercomputing 2003, the annual trade show for the high-performance computing industry. The conference is taking place in Phoenix this week.

The dominance of Intel products like the Itanium 64-bit processor and the Xeon server chip reflects a significant move away from proprietary systems and toward lower-cost cluster-based HPC. The trend started a few years ago when budget-constrained government scientists built a supercomputer by creating a cluster of off-the-shelf computers running the Linux operating system.

Intel's inroads into supercomputing are "driven by the strong increase in the number of clusters used for high-performance computing," observed Erich Strohmaier, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Labs who is one the researchers behind the Top500 list. Another factor, he added, is that manufacturers like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and SGI are all marketing high-performance machines designed around Intel chips.

For example, four supercomputers in the Top 10 are using either Xeon or Itanium 2 processors. Supercomputers at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are powered by Intel chips.

However, the fastest supercomputer in the world still remains the Earth Simulator built by NEC and installed last year at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan. It retained its No. 1 position with a performance benchmarked at 35.9 teraflops, or 35.9 trillion calculations per second.

The Earth Simulator, however, cost about $600 million to build vs. about $20 million for a supercomputer that Intel is helping build at Lawrence Livermore Labs. That supercomputer, called Thunder, will be deployed for basic scientific research, including electro-magnetic modeling.

Intel said Thunder should be operational in January and should clock in at about 20 teraflops. The system will contain 3,840 Itanium processors and Intel believes it will be the world's second fastest supercomputer.

Intel shares the Top500 spotlight with other low-cost systems, demonstrating a continuing trend toward cluster computing. Virginia Tech grouped together 1,100 Apple G5 Macintosh computers to create a supercomputer that took third place on the Top500 list, clocking in at 10.2 teraflops. Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chips are at the heart of a Los Alamos National Labs supercomputer system that ranked No. 6 at 8 teraflops.