Techotic

7. Tera-10 - Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique

The Commissariat à l’énergie atomique supercomputer is currently ranked No.7 on the top 500 list of fastest computer in the world. It was built by Bull SA for France’s Atomic Energy Commision.

This monster of a computer uses Linux as an operating system and consists of 544 of Bull’s NovaScale 6160 servers with each server eaturing eight Dual-Core Intel Itanium processors and runs at about 42.9 Teraflops. The Tera-10 is currently being used for nuclear testing simulations.

6. Thunderbird - Sandia National Laboratories

Thunderbird is an 8960-processor Linux cluster developed by Dell, Inc. and is placed nicely on No.6 on the top 500 fastest computers list.

Though the Thunderbird wasn’t design for single large scale task, but rather suited to perform many mid-sized tasks, such as performing weapons simulations, scale-to-device modeling of radiation effects on semiconductor electronics, and weapon-response safety in extreme thermal and impact environments.

It is currently resides at Sandia National Laboratories, a National Nuclear Security Administration lab, located in Albuquerque NM.

5. MareNostrum - Barcelona Supercomputing Center

The most powerful supercomputer in Europe at the moment consisting of 10,240 processors that can peak at 94.21 Teraflops with its Its 2,560 JS21 blade computing nodes take up a space of about half a basketball court and is currently resigns at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Barcelona, Spain.

The MareNostrum supercomputer is currently being used for a variety of applications which includes human genome research, weather forecasting, and drug research.

4. ASC Purple - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

ASC Purple can peak at 100 Teraflops with its redundant ring of 196 IBM Power5 SMP servers which contain a total of 12,544 microprocessors with 50 terabytes of total memory and 2 petabytes of storage disk capacity and currently being used to conduct nuclear weapons performance simulations.

3. BGW (Blue Gene/W) - IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Blue Gene/W or BGW can peak at around 114 Teraflops by using 20 refrigerator sized racks, each rack consists of 1024 nodes and every node contains two 700 MHz power 440 processors and 512 MB of memory.

Blue Gene/W is mainly use in production science computations including biological simulations and protein folding.

Red Storm - Sandia National Laboratories

Red Storm is a parallel processing supercomputer designed by Cray and Sandia Laboratories can peak at 124.42 Teraflops, it consists of 12,960 AMD Opteron computer nodes and uses a lightweight Linux Operating System.

Red Storm is currently being used to simulated testing on nuclear weapons stockpiling which includes designing replacement components, virtual testing of components under different conditions, and assisting in testing of weapons engineering and weapons physics.

1. Blue Gene/L - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Blue Gene/L is undoubtedly the most powerful supercomputer on earth peaking at 360 Teraflops by using 65,536 processors and runs a scaled down version of Linux . It is mainly use to simulate biochemical processes involving proteins.

Blue Gene/L was recently featured in the news when scientists ran a cortical simulator as complex as half of a mouse brain which is thought to have about eight million neurons with each one having up to 8,000 connections with other nerve fibers.

Those are the most powerful 7 supercomputers in the world right now. If you can find more powerful ones, let me know.