SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 21, 2004 – More than half of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world are now based on Intel® Itanium® or Xeon® processors, reflecting the trend away from deploying proprietary, one-of-a-kind supercomputers toward a building-block approach that takes advantage of standards-based, off-the-shelf components to build these powerful machines.

Intel Corporation’s platforms, whose influence in supercomputing has been gaining ground rapidly in recent years, laid claim to 286 sites in the “TOP500” list of supercomputer sites released today by the University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Three years ago Intel had only three systems on the list. Intel Itanium processors are the foundation for the second-ranked new “Thunder” system at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) near San Francisco and also the fastest “cluster” computer. The system took only five months to build and deploy.