Intel® Itanium® 2 Processors Power 83 Systems, Two in Top 10



PITTSBURGH, Nov. 8, 2004 – Nearly two-thirds of the world’s fastest supercomputers now use Intel® Itanium® or Intel® Xeon™ processors according to the 24th Edition of the “TOP500” list, illustrating the growing momentum toward the use of standard Intel components for the most demanding high performance computing applications. The TOP500 project was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems is assembled and released.

Intel architecture-based platforms currently make up 64 percent of the top 500 systems, continuing the surge in the use of Intel processors that accounted for only 19 systems in 2001 – approximately a 15-fold increase in the past three years.

“With 320 of the top 500 systems using Intel processors, it’s clear the high performance computing community has a solid preference for off-the-shelf components,” said Abhi Talwalkar, Intel vice president and general manager, Enterprise Platforms Group. “We’re really offering supercomputer performance at radically reduced prices and deployment times. The result is that the world is moving away from experimental, proprietary systems that take fortunes to buy and years to build.

“Intel architecture grew so fast in the past year on the TOP500 list it’s almost like Moore’s Law. Intel-based systems were up a staggering 70 percent in the past year, and the Itanium-based architecture was among the fastest-growing on the list.”

Intel Itanium 2 processors power 83 systems on the list, up from 61 previously, representing a 36 percent increase since June and up 160 percent from a year ago. Itanium-based deployments among the world’s fastest computers on the TOP500 list now exceed the combined RISC architectures of Power, SPARC, Alpha and MIPs.

NASA's Columbia supercomputer, powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors, took the No. 2 spot on the list. "It's great Columbia was ranked so high on the list," said Walt Brooks, chief of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Division. "But the most remarkable thing about Columbia is that in just five short months the Intel, NASA, SGI team manufactured, integrated and delivered to NASA's scientist and engineers a critically-needed increase in numerical simulation capability. Columbia is making key contributions to the Shuttle Return to Flight efforts as well as aeronautics, space and earth science and exploration, not just running artificial benchmarks."

Columbia boosts NASA’s computing power by approximately 10 times. Running 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors in 20 interconnected SGI® Altix® clusters, Columbia achieves a performance of greater than 52 teraFLOP/s. NASA used the Intel® Math Kernel Library to help achieve the highest performance possible.

The semi-annual TOP500 list of supercomputers is the work of Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. The complete report is available at http://www.top500.org.

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at http://www.intel.com/pressroom.

Intel, Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon are marks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

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