China takes two of the top three supercomputer places

David Heath
Monday, 15 November 2010 19:32

Business IT - Technology

As expected, Chinese supercomputers have taken the first and third places in the latest list of the world's top supercomputers and only five of the top ten are from USA.  Linux continues to reign supreme.

A recent report in advance of the latest Top500 list suggested that China's Tianhe-1A ('River' in Mandarin) would exceed the performance of the current champion the Cray XT5  'Jaguar' at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and this was born out in today's latest list with a result of 2.57 petaflop/sec.

Showing an increased geographical spread, of the top ten, five are in the United States, two in China and one each in Japan, France and Germany.  Five of those ten are also new to the list.  Additionally, the 500th ranked system in the new list occupied position 305 just six months ago.

In August, iTWire wrote of plans to re-benchmark the other Chinese system, Nebulae, as it was expected that the system was capable of much more than the quoted performance.  However, this clearly has no happened as the published data is unchanged for that computer.

Other highlights include Peter Jackson's Weta Studios retaining 5 places in the list with a group of equally-specified systems for use on digital graphics - clearly these will soon be set to work on the upcoming Hobbit pair of movies.

As predicted earlier this year, the new CSIRO computer at the ANU has made a spectacular debut at position 51 (the referenced article predicted somewhat better than that, but there have been a large number of highly placed new entrants).

China is now the number two country in the world with 42 systems in the Top 500 to USA's 275.

And of course, just about all of them run Linux...