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In an attempt to overcome it’s own challenge, IBM’s Roadrunner is the winner in the new supercomputer TOP500 hit parade, followed by IBM’s BlueGene/L (478.2 teraflop/s) at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The new Top500 List, which is issued twice a year, was unveiled at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

The list shows IBM’s Roadrunner, which broke the petaflop barrier last month, as the top-performing supercomputer. It also shows Intel Corp. dominating other chipmakers.

After a long time Sun has been ranked prominently with a new entry at number four position, the University of Texas’s Ranger (326 teraflop/s) system. What is perhaps most surprising to the authors of the list is the fact that 301 of the 500 supercomputers on last November’s list are nowhere to be seen. After seven months, they’re simply not powerful enough to make the list.

According to Jack Dongarra, a co-creator of the Top 500 list, “we attribute it to the many multicore systems on the list. Look at the incredible amount of change. We haven’t ever seen this amount of turnover,” he further added.

According to a press release, the Roadrunner, which is based on IBM QS22 blade servers, is more than twice as powerful as the Blue Gene/L system, which held the top spot in the last list, released in November. That machine clocked in at 478 teraflops, or 478 trillion calculations per second. The No. 3 Team Blue Gene reaches 450-teraflop performance.

Rounding out the top five systems was the new Sun Microsystems Sun Blade x6420 Ranger system, at 326 teraflops, and the upgraded Cray XT4 Jaguar, at 205 teraflops. The Sun system is at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas, and the Cray machine is at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The remaining top 10 systems, respectively, were the IBM Blue Gene/P system at Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany, the SGI Altix ICE 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center, the Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c at the Computational Research Laboratories in India, the IBM Blue Gene/P at IDRIS in France, and the SGI Altix ICE 8200EX at Total Exploration Production in France.