There is a new Top 500 supercomputer list out. The top 5 have 3 Nvidia GPU powered systems. They report that 17 are using GPUs as accelerators with 6 using Cell, 10 Nvidia, and so far just one using Radeons. The press release is here.

The 36th edition of the closely watched TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers confirms the rumored takeover of the top spot by the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, achieving a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second).

News of the Chinese system’s performance emerged in late October. As a result, the former number one system — the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee — is now ranked in second place. Jaguar achieved 1.75 petaflop/s running Linpack, the TOP500 benchmark application.

Advanced Micro Devices has lost 3.6% of their server market share recently. Previously, they held 10.1 percent of this segment. Analysts say that they will likely rebound in the future and that this dip can be attributed to the fact that AMD recently introduced new products. While one would expect the opposite to happen, OEMs were slow to the punch and failed to ship any of AMD's new 8 and 12-core Opterons in any significant volume. IDC says that AMD should have a strong 3rd and 4th quarter as they won't be facing these transition issues. PCWorld has more information.

Most of AMD's share loss occurred between the first and second quarters, when server makers were slow to offer AMD's new 6000 series Opterons in their systems.

"AMD is in the middle of a product transition. It stated in late Q1 and they hoped it would be completed in Q2, but it turns out it took their OEMs a bit longer to ramp up the products they were building," said Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron.

Serverwatch has published a HP server buyers guide.

According to Bartlett, these G7 servers combined with AMD Opteron 6100 series processors deliver a 27 times performance-per-watt increase over earlier models.
The G7 portfolio was again expanded in May with the ProLiant DL360 and DL380 as the new additions. Bartlett said these servers deliver up to a 20-to-1 consolidation ratio, reducing floor space and improving data center capacity.
In June, HP expanded the G7 portfolio yet again with the BL465c, BL685c, BL2x220, BL460c, BL620c and BL680c G7 -- three rackmount systems that include the DL580, DL585 and DL980 G7. These servers are based on Opteron 6100 Series and Intel Xeon 5600/7500 series processors.

AMD blogs about how you can measure cloud growth.

Cloud Computing continues to heat up as we approach the 2010 Summer Solstice. One of the forces seeding Cloud Computing is the exponential growth of online information. With 1.8 billion Internet users worldwide and a mind boggling 10 billion Google searches a month in the USA, it really feels like the “Intergalactic Computer Network” that J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider and his colleagues envisioned in the 1960’s is becoming a reality. However, even the leading-edge hyper scale data centers of cloud providers are finding all this data overwhelming. Check out the following video to better understand this data tsunami.

Penguin Computing has built a Top 500 supercomputer for Georgia Tech. It is more specifically ranked at #98. While this isn't the most powerful computer in the world, it still is interesting to see how they build it. Fortunately, we do get to see in this video that Penguin Computing put on Youtube. The computer uses AMD six-core Istanbul CPUs which helps the company get high performance out of a high density machine.