The Shaheen computer, which can handle 185.17 teraflops and is installed at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, has been listed among the fastest in the world, reported the PC World. The bi-annual Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is topped by the Roadrunner system at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Shaheen, been built in partnership with IBM, is meant to provide training and advice, consultation on best practices, to offer collaboration support, and to develop and deploy applications. The Shaheen installed at KAUST Center for Deep Computing Research (CDCR) plans to turn its facility into a petascale system in the future, and then to exaflop size (one million trillion calculations a second). Getting onto to the Top500 list has become quite a bit harder, reports the PC World. The entry level is now 17.1 teraflops, compared to 12.64 teraflops six months ago. Power consumption has become a more important part of supercomputer performance. The average power efficiency is now 150 megaflops/watt, compared to 132 megaflops/watt on November's list. A clear trend is the move to quad-core processors. 383 systems are now using processors with four cores, which is 47 more than six months ago. Intel's dominance in also increasing: 399 systems are now using Intel processors, up from 379 systems in November. The battle between IBM and HP continues. HP kept a narrow lead by number of systems, but at the same time IBM remains the clear leader in the Top500 list in performance. __
