INDUSTRY

SALT LAKE CITY -- MCR, the cluster supercomputer Linux NetworX built for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was ranked today as the fifth fastest supercomputer in the world on the TOP500 supercomputing list ( www.top500.org ). The 2,304-processor cluster can process 5.694 trillion calculations per second (teraFLOPs) running the Linpak benchmark, and is the only Linux-based supercomputer to be ranked within the top five. A 361-node cluster Linux NetworX built for Argonne National Laboratory also broke the teraFLOP barrier, capable of 1.6 trillion calculations per second, and is ranked 46th on the TOP500 supercomputing list. The TOP500 lists the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world based on Linpak benchmark results. "For the first time ever, clusters were able to gain a top ten spot in the TOP500 list of supercomputers. At position five, this is the largest Linux cluster ever recorded with a very impressive Linpack performance of 5.7 teraFLOPS," said Erich Strohmaier, computer scientist at NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-founder of the TOP500 list. "The system installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and built by Linux NetworX and Quadrics, is an important step in supercomputing history as it demonstrates the potentially large impact Linux clusters will have in the high performance computing community." The emergence of Linux clusters in the supercomputing industry is highlighted in Supercomputing's Epic Journey, an illustrated timeline and article researched and written by International Data Corp. (IDC) and an independent research group. The foldout timeline and article will be distributed at the SC2002 conference and trade show in Baltimore this week at Linux NetworX booth #1909. Supercomputing's Epic Journey explores the history of supercomputing from some of the first vacuum tube computers in the 1940s and traces landmark systems and events that are leading to the most recent developments in the TeraFLOPs era and cluster computing. "IDC has done a number of market studies of cluster computing and we see a large number of high performance technical users moving to clustered solutions," said Earl Joseph, research director at IDC. "We see Linux NetworX well positioned to take advantage of that market trend."