The worlds fastest supercomputer crown was held by the IBM’s Bluegene/L supercomputer for quite a long time till now but now Sun Microsystem’s new supercomputer which claims speeds up to 1.7 Petaflops is a new contender in the top Supercomputers,The design provides 21 million floating point operations per second which could be scaled upto 2 Petaflops. Sun’s constellation of Supercomputer will be installed at the Texas Advanced computing center ,the new supercomputer is a Linux cluster system ,it will have 3,288 nodes with 26,304 processing cores using the AMD’s forthcoming Barcelona 4 core design mounted on the Sun blades .(Click on Read more to expand)

The initial memory will be 52.6 Terabyte with RAM upto 105 TB,It still needs huge 3 Megawatts of power to run and a standard rack will hold 768 cores.The new system has just surpassed the IBM Bluegene/L supercomputer but IBM still holds its no. 1 position in terms of Supercomputer because it has come up with second generation of Bluegene series read below .

IBM announced its new generation of Bluegene Supercomputer which is named as Bluegene/P which could be designed and configured to reach the speeds of upto 3 petaflops ,The Bluegene/L used the dual core 700 MHz chips while the new IBM Bluegene/P uses the 4 850 MHz PowerPc 450 processor integrated on a single chip.IBM also said that the new Bluegene/P supercomputer is seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer.

This means IBM will be at no. 1 position and Sun will take the second position for the world’s fastest supercomputer.