The International Supercomputing Conference, which was held in Dresden, Germany, has made public this year’s Top 500 supercomputers list, and IBM is well ahead of its competition.

The first two supercomputers in the list, the Roadrunner and BlueGene/L, are both produced by IBM, which accounts for the design of another 210 machines that are included in the Top. Hewlett Packard comes second, with 183 supercomputers, but its best result, rank-wise, comes from the EKA system, which came only on 8th place in the race.

Last year’s fastest computer was IBM’s BlueGene/L, and the fact that it topped the list second this year comes only as a proof of the power of the company that produces it.

It would have been interesteing to see how Sun’s Ranger would have done last year, if it wasn’t for the delay in the arrival of some of its components that made the supercomputer loose the start. This year it came fourth, while Cray’s Jaguar placed 5th.

The only company other than IBM to have more than one system in the first ten positions of the top is SGI, whose Encanto supercomputer ranked 7th, while Altix came 10th.

An amusing fact is that the Roadrunner system is built based on enhanced versions of the chips that are used in the gaming console Sony PS3. The 12,240 Cell chips are backed up by another 6,562 AMD dual core chips. This supercomputer has been the first one to break the petaflops computing barrier.

In the microprocessor producer’s race, Intel held the lead, with its chips being the processing power behind about three quarter of the world’s fastest supercomputers.