Today is the start of ISC09, and as usual, a new Top500 list kicks off the action. IBM’s Roadrunner hangs on to the top slot, with Cray’s XT5 Jaguar still there in second place. SGI‘s Pleiades system at NASA Ames is pushed down to fourth place, as the new Jugene Bluegene/P system enters at number 3.

The full list, with more details on each of the systems, can be found at http://top500.org/lists/2009/06

NASA have been playing about with their Silicon Graphics supercomputers, using new models for more accurate climate change predication. By mapping the faces of a cube to the surface of a sphere, they’ve worked out that they get a higher degree of accuracy and more realistic modelling.

Climate modelling is one of the most resource intensive compute jobs you can carry out. NASA have been using their Silicon Graphics Columbia supercomputer for the initial simulation, and then moved to the more powerful SGI Pleiades installation.

You can read more – as well as watch a cool video with details of the visualisation – at this page on NASA’s site.

Supercomputing 2008 kicks off this week, and that means a new update to the Top 500 list.

IBM have given RoadRunner a shot in the arm, boosting sustained Linpack performance to 1.105 petaflops, up from it’s previous best of 1.026.

Cray have done a good job with Jaguar, moving from XT4 frames with a sustained 205 teraflops, to XT5 frames, boosting sustained performance to 1.059 petaflops.

Silicon Graphics come in at third place, with the Pleiades Altix ICE cluster, which they put together for NASA’s Ames Research Center. At 51200 cores and 51TB of memory it’s a bit of a beast, although as a cluster it’s a bit less interesting than a Single System Image (SSI) machine.

SGI‘s Pleiades manages to sustain 487 teraflops, pushing BlueGene/L into fourth place. The previous supercomputer Silicon Graphics built for NASA Ames, Columbia, languishes down in 39th place, which should give some idea of the immense scale of performance improvements taking place.

You can grab the full system stats for Pleiades from http://www.top500.org/system/9832