National Center for Computational Sciences

On Monday, researchers will release a twice-yearly list of the 500 biggest computers in the world. The latest rankings should provide some new clues about high tech’s relentless speed race, and how it’s being funded.

National labs and other research institutions buy these supercomputers to handle huge number-crunching tasks, like modeling weather patterns, nuclear explosions and aircraft designs. They rely heavily on advances from the semiconductor industry, since each system uses thousands of microprocessor chips–typically supplied by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and IBM.

Rankings on the so-called Top500 list are determined by performing a set of mathematical calculations known as Linpack that indicate how fast a system is. Chip makers have been making it easier and less expensive to get higher scores by designing generations of products that plug into the same socket; upgrading a machine boils down to pulling circuit boards out of a system, plugging in a faster chip–or two, or four–and sticking boards back into a system.

A favorite to come in as No. 1 next week is Jaguar, a massive system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory built by Cray using AMD’s Opteron chips. The system, which ranked No. 2 in the list last June, was originally built using models that each had four processor cores (think of each core as one calculating engine). Over the past few months, technicians at the Tennessee lab have been replacing many of those chips with newer models that have six cores; the upgraded portion of the system has 224,256 cores, the lab says.

AMD showed a video of the upgrade process during a meeting with analysts in Silicon Valley Wednesday. Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s products group, said it thinks the upgraded Jaguar “is going to rank pretty high up there” when the Top500 list is announced.

Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.