INDUSTRY

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp., the largest supplier of microprocessors for desktop computers, is expanding further into the lucrative field of high-performance computing, according to a study released today. Such computing involves either clusters of separate networked computers with up to 3,000 processors in them or supercomputers with hundreds of chips on one machine. While supercomputing has been predominant in research institutions, more and more companies, like banks, are using it for applications such as complex number crunching. Of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, 119 were based on Intel chips, up from 56 systems six months ago and three a year ago, according to the semiannual Top500 List, compiled by researchers at the University of Mannheim in Germany, the University of Tennessee and the National Energy Research Supercomputer Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "This is a major shift in this marketplace,'' according to a statement on the Top500 List. "With this increase, the Intel processor family joins IBM's Power architecture and Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC chips as one of the dominant processors used in HPC (high performance computing) systems." Nineteen Intel Itanium-based systems were on the list, up from two six months ago and one a year ago. In addition, systems with as few as 92 Intel processors are appearing on the list for the first time, Intel said. More than one-third of the world's most powerful computers with Intel processors are used by corporations for intensive data crunching. An Intel Itanium 2-based system, at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, broke into the top 10 for the first time and an Intel Xeon-based cluster was No. 3 on the list, Intel said. Later this week, Intel will announce a new version of Itanium 2 for large-scale clustering.