Four out of five supercomputers powered by Intel processors

The list shows that 402 of the world's top 500 systems incorporate the company's processors, with Intel chips powering up 20 of the top 50 systems. Systems using Intel Xeon quad core processors lead the list with 379 spots. Richard Dracott, general manager of Intel's High Performance Computing Group, said: "With the industry's rapid adoption of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series processor, Intel has more systems than ever on the Linpack benchmark based Top500 list. We're even more elated that customers are choosing our Xeon processor products not only for Linpack scores, but also because of the exceptional application performance delivered across a wide range of real world workloads found in energy exploration, science research and 3D internet." Meanwhile, Intel has announced new technologies that it says will speed up science and engineering projects such as the development of new drugs and climate change research. In the first half of 2010, Intel will launch a new high performance computing optimised version of its forthcoming processor codenamed 'Nehalem-Ex'. According to Intel, the six core chip will run at higher frequencies than 8 core versions of the Nehalem-Ex processors and incorporate high amounts of memory bandwidth and capacity. Intel also announced that a beta program for its Ct technology will be available at the end of 2009. The technology is designed to make parallel programming in the C and C++ languages easier by automatically parallelising code across multicore processors.