IBM is Tops, Once Again, in Technical Computing
The TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was just released.
IBM had numerous leading entries in this list. Let us count the ways. IBM had the:
Most installed aggregate throughput with over 73.2 Petaflops out of 223 Petaflops (32.8%) HP had 14.7%. And Oracle. Oracle had .4%. Yes, that’s 0.4%. And IBM has had this Lead for 28 Lists in a row. Most in TOP 10 with 5 ( #3 LLNL-Sequoia BG/Q, #5 ANL-Mira BG/Q, #7 Juelich–JUQUEEN BG/Q, #8 LLNL-Vulcan BG/Q, #9 LRZ-SuperMUC iDataPlex) Most in TOP 20 with 9 Most in TOP 100 with 34 Fastest system in Europe (Juelich-JUQUEEN BG/Q) Fastest Intel based system (x86-only LRZ-SuperMUC iDataPlex) 22 of 28 most energy-efficient systems (over 2,000 MF/w)
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Source: http://www.top500.org. Results current as of 6/18/13.
The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.
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benchmarkingblog 
Why blatantly attack Oracle based on figures for mainframe computing when they JUST End of Life’d their mainframe servers.. (M3000, M4000, etc.) I think it’s obvious that Oracle sees no future in purely mainframe systems. I read somewhere they spent 2.3bil on R&D for their servers alone in 2011 or 2012. Don’t you agree that ~5 billion dollars, worth of research and design since the SUN acquisition in mid 2010, would buy enough intelligent people to make intelligent decisions on the future of supercomputing? and whether or not to invest in a dying technology?
Interested in hearing your response.
ServerSpecialist
July 12, 2013 at 9:26 pm
I don’t see an attack at all rather the author made a observation. The Top500 list is made up of all architectures and not just Oracles SPARC servers which you reference (M3000, M4000, etc). Also, SPARC servers are not mainframes. They are midrange RISC / UNIX servers. Sun used to have a unfied SPARC architecture but as they began to fragment they had UltraSPARC, SPARC64 from Fujitsu and UltraSPARC T based servers. Today we mostly see the latest iterations of UltraSPARC T series which marketing calls T5. They are more akin to entry level servers with a RISC chip offering various socket configurations running Solaris.
I hope all customers with existing SPARC footprints and those considering the T series read your post so they can hear from someone who is clearly a fan of Oracle that there is no future in their RISC technology. Yes, Oracle wants to sell x86 because they are a software company. x86 consumes far more software licenses than IBM’s Power servers. With the recent Oracle announcement of their renewing the relationship with Oracle makes me suspicious they are going to shift their x86 business to include what they do in the Exa* products to using Dell products. Makes sense to shift those costs particularly since Oracle is a software (and marketing) company.
Brett Murphy
July 24, 2013 at 1:30 pm