The Blue Gene/Q Prototype II received the #1 ranking on the latest Graph500 list announced today at SC11 in Seattle. The submission for the winning ranking was a joint effort between IBM, Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Graph500 list ranks supercomputers based on their performance on data-intensive applications and thus complements the Top 500 list that is based on the LINPACK benchmark. Argonne's Blue Gene/P, Intrepid, received an impressive fifth-place ranking on the list.

Traditional benchmarks and performance metrics fail to provide useful information on the suitability of supercomputing systems for data-intensive applications. Backed by a steering committee of more than 30 international HPC experts from academia, industry, and national laboratories, Graph 500 established a new set of large-scale benchmarks for these applications. The new benchmarks will guide the design of hardware architectures and software systems intended to support such applications and help procurements.

For more information, contact Kalyan Kumaran, or visit the Graph 500 website, http://www.graph500.org/nov2011.html.