IBM has dominated the first annual HPC Challenge Competition at the Supercomputing 2005 Conference. The DOE/NNSA/LLNL team, using IBM's Blue Gene/L system, swept all four Class 1 benchmark awards. The IBM team tied with the Cray team for the Class 2 "elegant" implemention award.

In the 17th year of SC, he is serving as the co-chair for the first year of the HPC Challenge award competition, the results of which are being revealed today. The goal of the competition, which is sponsored by DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems Program and HPCwire, is to develop a set of HPC hardware and software capabilities that become de rigeur for the productive use of all HPC systems.

HPCwire recently spoke with Marie-Christine Sawley, director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), about its use of the relatively new HPC Challenge benchmark for recent large-scale supercomputer procurement. Although HPCwire expects the U.S. government to begin using the HPC Challenge in procurements soon, CSCS may be the world's first major site to do this.

If there's one thing you can tell by looking at the newest list of the most powerful (read fastest) supercomputers in the world, it's that some real change is taking place in the HPC field. Five of the top 10 systems are new to the list, and over 200 smaller systems from last November's rankings have been eclipsed by faster ones.

According to Cray and AMD, two Cray supercomputer products that leverage the AMD Opteron processor and HyperTransport technology, the Cray XT3 and Cray XD1 systems, have posted leading overall results on the HPC Challenge benchmark tests.