The list of the world's top 500 supercomputers, presented at last week's SC2003 Igniting Innovation conference in Phoenix, contains several notable new life science entries.

In the number three slot was Virginia Tech's Terascale Computing Facility, a homebuilt supercomputing cluster composed of 1100 Apple G5 computers, where each node has dual 64-bit PowerPC 2 GHz processors, 4 GB of memory and 160 GB of storage.

The Virginia Tech system, which was just announced this month, has a peak measured performance of 10.28 teraflops (10.28 trillion floating point operations per second). Virginia Tech will use the cluster to support a wide range of scientific research, including work in computational chemistry, molecular statistics, and molecular modeling of proteins. The Virginia Tech system is only the third system ever to be benchmarked with a peak performance that exceeds 10 teraflops.

The other major notable life science computer to make the list for the first time is IBM's Blue Gene/L Prototype. The system is ranked 73rd on the list with an official measured peak performance of 1.435 teraflops.

A number of university supercomputer systems, which will be dedicated to scientific research, also made the list for the first time. Among the new university entrants in the top 100 are the Chinese Academy of Science, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and the University of Liverpool.

Clusters

A trend that was evident last year and continues this year is the increased adoption of clusters in high-performance computing environments.

This year, seven of the top 10 computers are clusters. In contrast, there were only two clusters on last November's Top 500 list. All told, 208 cluster systems made the Top 500 list announced this week.

For sheer performance, the total combined processing power of the entire top 500 supercomputers is 528 teraflops. Six months ago, when the previous list was released, the total combined power was 375 teraflops.

There are now 131 systems that have a measured peak performance benchmark that exceeds 1 teraFLOPS.

Japan's Earth Simulator and the ASCI Q system at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory retained the top two spots, benchmarked with peak performances of 35.86 and 13.88 teraflops, respectively.

The Top 500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. Complete details about the list can be found at www.top500.org