While most enterprises will never need the capabilities of supercomputing systems, these platforms often show trends that will impact data centers of all businesses. In 2008 some of those trends include Microsoft moving into the supercomputing pack, Linux running the majority of systems and IBM holding all of the top 10 spots. Capabilities of the high performance computing (HPC) platforms of yesterday are the norm today.

2008 Rankings

The 2008 Super Computing Top500 ratings show IBM taking top billing in pure power. The IBM Roadrunner system comes in with processing capabilities of over 1 PetaFlop (one thousand trillion calculations per second) easily beating the runner-up, an IBM Blue Gene system running at less than half that performance. Making its debut in the list is the pre-release version of Microsoft HPC 2008 at number 23. While overall performance shown by the supercomputer systems is impressive, what is more interesting to the enterprise are some of the trends displayed in these systems.

While the Top500 supercomputers all use thousands of processors there is nothing that stops an enterprise from creating its own HPC environment with just a few servers.