Tokyo, Nov 15, 2011 - (JCN Newswire - MySolutionInfo) - RIKEN and Fujitsu have taken the No. 1 position for the "K computer" on the 38th TOP500 list announced today in the United States (November 14, PST), for a consecutive two terms in a row. The K computer, currently under joint development, was designated as being the world's fastest supercomputer. The TOP500 was previously announced in June 2011. The K computer, jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, is part of the High-Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) initiative led by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

The TOP500-ranked K computer system has 864 computer racks equipped with a total of 88,128 CPUs. The system achieved the world's best LINPACK benchmark performance of 10.51 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second) with a computer efficiency ratio of 93.2%. LINPACK is a program developed by J. Dongarra, Ph.D., of the University of Tennessee, for solving a system of linear equations using matrix computation. It is the benchmark program used to create the TOP500 list, which ranks the performance of the world's supercomputers (announced in June and November of every year).

Top 10 Supercomputers on the TOP500 List
1. K computer
Site: RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS)
Vendor: Fujitsu
Country: Japan
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: Japan

2. Tianhe-1A
Site: National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin
Vendor: NUDT
Country: China
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: 2,566

3. Jaguar
Site: DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Vendor: Cray Inc.
Country: United States
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: 1,759

4. Nebulae
Site: National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS)
Vendor: Dawning
Country: China
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: 1,271

5. TSUBAME 2.0
Site: GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Vendor: NEC/HP
Country: Japan
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: 1,192

6. Cielo
Site: DOE/NNSA/LANL/SNL
Vendor: Cray Inc.
Country: United States
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: 1,110

7. Pleiades
Site: NASA/Ames Research Center/NAS
Vendor: SGI
Country: United States
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: 1,088

8. Hopper
Site: DOE/SC/LBNL/NERSC
Vendor: Cray Inc.
Country: United States
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: 1,054

9. Tera-100
Site: Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA)
Vendor: Bull SA
Country: France
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: 1,050

10. Roadrunner
Site: DOE/NNSA/LANL
Vendor: IBM
Country: United States
Maximal LINPACK performance achieved: 1,042

The certification ceremony will be held at SC11, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, being held in Seattle, Washington in the United States. The ceremony is scheduled to take place on November 15, 2011 PST (November 16, 2011 in Japan).