For the first time since November 2009, a United States supercomputer sits atop the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers.

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The TOP500 has provided a ranking of systems for two decades in a consistent fashion, which has provided the high-performance community with a way to compare systems and to establish targets for vendors to deliver increased capabilities to the most challenging applications.

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The HPC Challenge Awards demonstrate that, in addition to achieving successive top-place rankings on the June and November 2011 editions of the TOP500 list measuring LINPACK computational speed, the K computer is evaluated very highly in all-around performance as a general-purpose supercomputer. The K computer is currently under joint development by RIKEN and Fujitsu.

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The Jaguar and Kraken supercomputers housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Leadership Computing Facility and the University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences continued to demonstrate their balanced architectures this week, taking half the top spots in this year's High-Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge.

The challenge gives the world's most powerful systems an opportunity to demonstrate the range of hardware and software capabilities necessary for a useful supercomputer.

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 The HPC Challenge Awards are designed to evaluate four key measures that represent frequently used numerical operation patterns in scientific computing. Among them, the Global FFT is widely utilized in important scientific applications, such as climate modeling, which is critical to tackling environmental issues, and solid-earth geophysics, including seismic analysis, as well as designing of new materials.

The award-winning performance of the Earth Simulator on the Global FFT demonstrates the system's exceptional processing capabilities on real scientific application software.

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