Brief: AMD Shakes Up Top500 Supercomputer ListBrief: AMD Shakes Up Top500 Supercomputer List

Advanced Micro Devices is making a name for itself in supercomputing, thanks to its dual-core Opteron processor. On the Top500 Supercomputers list released last week, the number of AMD-based systems jumped to 113 from just 55 a year ago.

That's bad news for Intel, which has watched AMD ride Opteron to market share growth in business servers. Intel still is the most-used processor for supercomputers, but it lost ground in the semiannual list, from having 333 systems on the Top500 a year ago to 261 this year. AMD nudged out IBM--93 of the systems on the list now use Power processors, up from 73 a year ago--to take over the No. 2 spot.

"The supercomputing community, the engineering and scientific applications that need 64-bit performance, have decided that the Opteron is the best price point for 64-bit computing," says Horst Simon, director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and one of the report's four authors.

IBM can still boast the No. 1 supercomputer, with its system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory packing more than twice the performance of the next closest competitor. Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee professor and co-author of the report, predicts the IBM system will be No. 1 for two more lists.