For the first time ever, India has placed a system in the top 10 of the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites List with Computational Research Laboratories - a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons in Pune, India - installing a HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system which was ranked fourth.They integrated this system with their own innovative routing technology and achieved 117.9 TFlop/s (`teraflops' or trillions of calculations per second) performance.Supercomputers, introduced in the 1960s, were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. Cray, himself, never used the word "supercomputer".Today, supercomputers are typically custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as IBM and HP, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience, although Cray Inc. still specialises in building supercomputers. The Cray-2 was the world's fastest computer from 1985 to 1989. The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's normal computer.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research (including research into global warming), molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and the like. Major universities, military agencies and scientific research laboratories are heavy users.The latest list shows five new entrants in the Top 10, which includes sites in the United States, Germany, India and Sweden. Meanwhile, IBM once again dominated the competition in the semi-annual rankings of supercomputers with its BlueGene/L System which it jointly developed with the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.Although BlueGene/L has occupied the No. 1 position since November 2004, the current system has been significantly expanded and now achieves a Linpack benchmark performance of now 478.2 TFop/s, compared to 280.6 TFlop/s six months ago before its upgrade. At No. 2 is a brand-new first installation of a newer version of the same type of IBM system. It is a BlueGene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) and it achieved performance of 167.3 TFlop/s.
