HP places two systems in top five of TOP500

HP today announced that it placed two systems in the top five of the TOP500 Supercomputer list, which catalogs the world’s 500 most powerful installed technical and commercial computer systems. In addition, HP secured one-third of the implementations on the list to maintain its ranking as a leading provider of supercomputing systems. The HP-based Computational Research Laboratories system was the largest Asia Pacific-based system on the TOP500 and No. 4 worldwide. An HP-based system for a Swedish government agency was the fifth largest worldwide. “Placing two systems in the top five while maintaining a prominent position across the TOP500 demonstrates that HP’s high-performance computing strategy is addressing customer needs with the right balance of solutions and price/performance,” said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing, HP. “Our focus is to provide innovative high-performance technology to help engineers, scientists and researchers accelerate research and discovery.” Power of blades HP BladeSystem c-Class servers continued to play a major role in HP’s overall position with 151 of the current systems using blade-based clusters. The market-leading c-Class is an ideal platform for high-performance computing clusters because it supports high-performance interconnects and increased processors and nodes and delivers simplified management, reduced interconnect and network complexity, and efficient power and cooling. Top ranking customers Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a division of TATA, India’s largest conglomerate, has deployed the largest supercomputer in Asia Pacific for use in the computational sciences space. The system will enable the organization to advance the state of modeling and simulation on a wide range of scientific fields, including life sciences and computer-aided engineering. In addition, both the machine and the data center were designed to be a stepping stone toward petascale capabilities. Using the machine as a test platform, CRL will conduct fundamental research on interconnects and algorithms to reduce the time it takes to create applications. The implementation has a peak performance of 175 teraflops per second (Tflop/s, trillions of floating-point operations per second). The TATA system, an HP Cluster Platform 3000BL, has 114 HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosures, each with 16 dual-socket HP ProLiant BL460c compute nodes, all connected via 4X DDR Infiniband switches. HP’s second system in the top five is a 182 peak Tflop/s HP Cluster Platform 3000BL based on 2,128 HP ProLiant BL460c blade servers used by a Swedish government agency. The implementation, which has been measured for the list with 1,716 blade servers, was built to enable the organization to dramatically improve the performance of its operations.