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