The IBM Roadrunner remains undefeated as the world’s fastest computer. The Roadrunner is one of the so-called “supercomputers.” This time, however, it was a close call between the IBM Roadrunner and Cray’s Jaguar. Roadrunner, the defending champion, managed to keep its ground in front of the up-and-coming Jaguar.

The SC08 conference was held recently, namely on Friday, in Austin Texas, where the Top500 list was issued. After calculations, it was shown that the Roadrunner managed to reach the astounding speed of 1.105 petaflops per second. The Jaguar came in second, but it was very close to the Roadrunner, reaching the whopping speed of 1.059 petaflops per second.

The Roadrunner and the Jaguar are the only two supercomputers in the world so far able to perform over a quadrillion calculations per second.

The nine-core PowerXCell processors, which are also used for the Sony PlayStation 3 and the operating system Linux are the chips that power the Roadrunner. The Jaguar, on the other hand, has quad-core processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices.
The Energy Department of the national laboratories is home to seven of the top ten systems in the world. The United States is home to nine out of the ten. The tenth system, located out of the United States, is the Dawning 5000A, hosted by the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, in China.

The Top 500 also features the top system vendors. Hewlett-Packard won the competition with 209, while IBM only sold 188. The statistic was opposite in June, when IBM had sold 210 systems, and Hewlett-Packard – 183. Most of these systems used the famous Intel processors.