Supercomputing 08 is on all this week, so there should be shed loads of interesting news coming out. It’s one of the high points of the geek year, even if you’re not a Silicon Graphics fan, and each year I’m gutted I can’t attend.

The latest news is from HPCwire, who have published their Reader’s Choice Awards. Silicon Graphics have been voted for three of them by HPCwire readers:

• Best HPC Server Product or Technology was awarded to the SGI Altix ICE 8200 blade server
• Best HPC Visualization Product or Technology went to Silicon Graphics RemoteVUE
• one of the Top 5 Vendors to Watch in 2009 is SGI

The entire VUE software suite is going to be really interesting – it’s another great breakthrough for SGI and it has some real potential. The Altix ICE gear has been slowly gaining traction and although clusters don’t strike me as impressive as large (traditional even?) supercomputers, they’re still damn complex and very interesting technology.

Way down in Middle Earth, Weta Digital picked up a Reader’s Choice award for Best Use of HPC in the Entertainment Industry.

As a life long Ferrari fan (and driver!) I’m pleased to see the HPCwire Editor’s Choice award for Best Use of HPC in the Automotive Industry has gone to the Ferrari F1 team.

You can read through the full list of awards at http://www.hpcwire.com/specialfeatures/sc08/offthewire/HPCwire_Announces_Annual_Readers_Choice_Awards_at_SC08.html.

Supercomputing 2008 kicks off this week, and that means a new update to the Top 500 list.

IBM have given RoadRunner a shot in the arm, boosting sustained Linpack performance to 1.105 petaflops, up from it’s previous best of 1.026.

Cray have done a good job with Jaguar, moving from XT4 frames with a sustained 205 teraflops, to XT5 frames, boosting sustained performance to 1.059 petaflops.

Silicon Graphics come in at third place, with the Pleiades Altix ICE cluster, which they put together for NASA’s Ames Research Center. At 51200 cores and 51TB of memory it’s a bit of a beast, although as a cluster it’s a bit less interesting than a Single System Image (SSI) machine.

SGI‘s Pleiades manages to sustain 487 teraflops, pushing BlueGene/L into fourth place. The previous supercomputer Silicon Graphics built for NASA Ames, Columbia, languishes down in 39th place, which should give some idea of the immense scale of performance improvements taking place.

You can grab the full system stats for Pleiades from http://www.top500.org/system/9832