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Market research company IDC said its second review of the performances of nearly 900 high-performance computers had ranked the Earth Simulator as the most powerful. The Earth Simulator was created by computer giant NEC as part of an initiative sponsored by the Japanese government to attempt to predict changes in the global climate. The Simulator has 5,120 processors and scored over 40,000 points in the ranking.
Second in the list was IBM's ASCI White Computer, which has 8,192 processors. However, it trailed massively behind the Earth Simulator in the IDC ranking with nearly 4,900 points.
The IDC Balanced Rating ranks computers and computer clusters on several area of performance including processor performance, memory effectiveness and scalability. It is divided into four categories: technical capability computers (systems designed to solve the most demanding problems), technical enterprise computers (systems selling for USD1 million or more), technical division computers (systems sold for between USD250,000 to USD999,000), and technical department computers (systems sold for less than USD250,000). The listings ranks the top 50 computers in each category.
IBM's eServer pSeries p690 took the top spot in the enterprise section with a cluster rating of 521.09, HP's SuperDome (PA-8700) was first in the divisional category, while Hewlett-Packard also took first place in department computers with its rp8400.
The results also demonstrated the shifting of power in the supercomputer sector. Cray, which had nearly half of the top 500 computers in IDC's last ranking, now has just 20 percent of its machines in the listing. While HP, thanks in part to its merger with Compaq, is in close contention with IBM for the title of leading manufacturer of high-performance computers.
IDC said that its listing would help users better understand how different computer architectures match or don't match their requirements and would be particularly helpful for organisations that do not have the financial resources to fully test systems before purchase.
"Predicting the performance characteristics of a computer for your specific application codes is a very complex process and buyers often narrow the field of choices by first deciding on the basic computer architecture type, e.g., a single computer vs. a cluster, large nodes vs. small nodes, RISC vs. vectors, etc. Any broad ranking list like this one is often more useful in the acquisition of lower priced computers since you can't afford to spent a million dollars to evaluate buying a USD200,000 system," said Earl Joseph, IDC's research director of worldwide systems and servers, in a statement.
This is the second time that IDC has produced its Balanced Rating and for the latest version the research organisation said that it refined its testing to better represent the computing power of each machine, including adding a measure of integer performance. IDC also said that the listing would have been released at the start of this year, but it was delayed due to "sour grapes" from some vendors.
The full rankings are available at IDC's Web site.
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