PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov 17, 2003 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- For the fourth consecutive time, HP (NYSE:HPQ) ranks as the No. 1 supercomputing provider on the TOP500 Supercomputer list(1), which catalogs the world's 500 most powerful installed technical and commercial computer systems.

With 165 entries, representing nearly one-third of the posted sites, HP has more installations on the TOP500 list than any other vendor. With its powerful HP Integrity, Superdome and AlphaServer systems, HP increased its share on this exclusive list from its June 2003 showing of 159 entries. HP also secured two of the top five spots -- No. 2 Los Alamos National Laboratory and No. 5 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

"HP Superdome servers represent nearly 25 percent of the TOP500 list, which underscores HP's leadership in high performance technical computing," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager of the High Performance Technical Computing Division, HP. "The list also reflects the growing momentum of Itanium-based HP Integrity servers, which deliver top performance through innovation built on standards."

Supercomputers based on the Intel(R) IA-32 and Itanium(R) 2 architectures made substantial gains on the list, securing a total of 189 spots, an increase from 119 in June. Among these were 33 HP systems, including seven HP Integrity Superdome clusters and the HP rx2600 server cluster installed at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the most powerful Itanium 2-based system in the world.

"The unique architecture and balance of our HP supercomputer enables us to address large-scale computational, biological and chemical sciences with the best time-to-solution of any system we benchmarked," said Scott Studham, manager of High-Performance Computing Systems, PNNL. "HP delivered a first-rate system with unprecedented storage, an interconnect that allows processors to communicate in less than three microseconds, and Intel's next-generation Itanium 2 processors."

HP Superdome systems equipped with PA-RISC and Itanium processors accounted for 121 of the company's entries and HP AlphaServer systems represented 18 sites, including the most powerful system in the United States -- the AlphaServer-based ASCI Q system at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The TOP500 ranking of supercomputers is released twice a year by researchers at the Universities of Tennessee and Mannheim, Germany, and at NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The list ranks supercomputers worldwide based on the Linpack N*N Benchmark, a yardstick of performance that is a reflection of processor speed and scalability.