The new Top 500 supercomputer list is out, and it looks remarkably like the previous one, in that it charts a continuing exponential growth in the aggregate power of the worlds top computers. Awesome technological achievement – but no great surprise. As The Register puts it in a headline “World Yawns at Petaflops”.
The yawning is helped by the fact that the number one and number two computers this time round are the same as they were last time round: the US Department of Energy’s Roadrunner, at Los Alamos, and its Jaguar, at Oak Ridge.
But if you want to get geeky on the topic there are some possibly interesting details and trends to see in the data that the Top 500 lists creators make available in a variety of helpful formats.
Over the 16 years the list has been going, there are two very clear trends. In terms of who makes the things, IBM and to a lesser extent Hewlett Packard have stormed ahead, offering massively parallel systems based on thousands of chips. Between them they provide almost 400 of the top 500 systems; since the height of Blue-Gene fever a few years ago HP looks to have picked up some market share at IBM’s expense, but the overall picture looks reasonably stable. An associated decade long trend is the decline of Japan as a player in this game (see: Japan’s supercomputing dreams hit a roadblock).
By contrast, Germany makes quite a splash in this list with the only two systems in the top 10 outside the US, both at Forschungszentrum Juelich. “Deutschland ist Supercomputer-Schwergewicht” says Austria’s Der Standard, and there’s a lot of other coverage in German language press; Germany is now third in total processing power, with 5.8% of the total behind the UK’s 8.8% and the US’s 58.2%.
Various people also point out the arrival of Saudi Arabia in the top 20 with Shaheen at the King Abdulla University of Science and Technology. The Australians, though, are in self-flagellatory mood: as Ry Crozier points out on the itNews site, Australia had 11 top 500 machines in 2005, but only one today, at the Animal Logic CGI house.
Image: Roadrunner supercomputer / DOE Photo