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Report: Use Of IBM Supercomputing Power Reaches All-Time High

An independent study named IBM as the world's leading provider of supercomputing power with a record total of 188 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) of power. According to analysis from the Top500 List of Supercomputers, IBM with a 35.5 percent share, dominates the global supercomputing market with 56 percent more processing power than its closest rival, runner up HP with 22.7 percent.

IBM supercomputers now account for 55 percent of the Top 100 of the most powerful supercomputers on the list, versus 9 percent for HP. IBM's POWER chip technology drives more of the top 100 most powerful supercomputers in world than any other processor architecture.

The announcement follows IBM's introduction of a prototype of its Blue Gene/L supercomputer -- a computer roughly the size of a 30-inch television -- that is ranked on the Top500 List as the 73rd most powerful supercomputer in the world. The Blue Gene/L prototype machine represents a radical new design for supercomputing. At one-twentieth the physical size of existing machines of comparable power, Blue Gene/L enables dramatic reductions in power consumption, cost and space requirements for businesses requiring immense computing power.

The full Blue Gene/L machine, which is being built for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, will be 128 times larger, occupying 64 full racks. When completed in 2005, IBM expects Blue Gene/L to lead the Top500 supercomputer list by a wide margin. Compared with today's fastest supercomputers, it will be six times faster, consume one-fifteenth the power per computation and be 10 times more compact than today's fastest supercomputers

"Leveraging our strengths in technology innovation, research, sophisticated software and deep industry knowledge, IBM continues to build the world's most powerful supercomputers," said Dave Turek, vice president of IBM Deep Computing. "IBM supercomputers are helping customers solve some of the most complex problems in areas as diverse as global climate simulations, high energy physics research, human genomics, drug development, motion picture animation, fraud detection, financial risk analysis, computer aided engineering, cosmology and aeronautics."

Other Key Indicators Of IBM Supercomputing Leadership:

IBM has 159 supercomputer systems installed. IBM has the most Linux clusters on the Top500 List with 42 percent of all Linux clusters 13 IBM eServer BladeCenter systems made the list for the first time, an impressive debut for a system that has been available for less than one year. IBM leads in the number of processors with 109,625. Sixty-nine IBM supercomputers -- each with greater than 1 teraflop HPC performance -- represent 53 percent of all systems over 1 teraflop on the Top500.

The "Top500 List Supercomputing Sites" is compiled and published by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany). The entire list can be viewed at http://www.top500.org.

About IBM

IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com.