The Windows operating system currently powers the world's 15th most powerful supercomputer, according to the Linpack Benchmark. While the position is nothing short of meritorious on a market traditionally dominated both in terms of share and performance by the Linux open source platform, fact is that Windows managed to lose five positions in just the last half of year.

The supercomputer in question is the Chinese-built Dawning 5000A housed at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center at No 15. The high performance computing system is operated with the latest release of Windows for supercomputers, namely Windows HPC Server 2008.

In the 33rd TOP500 of Supercomputers, the Shanghai China Supercomputer Center - Magic Cube - Dawning 5000A (QC Opteron 1.9 Ghz, Infiniband, running Windows HPC 2008) occupies the 15th spot. The supercomputer is capable of reaching 180.60 Teraflops. However, when it was initially introduced in 2008, the machine was the 10th most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the 32nd edition of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers.

Microsoft revealed that the ego cluster of the Dawning 5000A comprised 1950 blades. According to the Redmond-based company, each blade sports no less than 16 cores, and a total of 64 GB memory 4xDDR IB and 1GB/s GigE networks. The foundation of the blades is delivered by TYAN motherboards featuring four sockets and AMD Opteron 8347 HE (Barcelona b3) CPUs running at 1.9 GHz.

The fastest supercomputer in the world continues to be Roadrunner - BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband / 2008 built by IBM at no less than 1.105 petaflop/s. Runner up is Jaguar - Cray XT5 QC 2.3 GHz / 2008 put together by Cray Inc. at 1.059 petaflop/s. But there is now a new number three, the JUGENE - Blue Gene/P Solution, built in 2009 by IBM for the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany. JUGENE climbed to a total of 825.5 teraflop/s.