Japan reclaims top supercomputer position

David Heath
Tuesday, 21 June 2011 16:27

IT Industry - Development

Not since the Earth Simulator was dethroned in 2004 has Japan held the top position in the Top500 supercomputer list.

Not only has the Earth Simulator lost its place, in fact the lowest performing computer on the latest Top500 list is around 20% faster than the Earth Simulator.

In the November 2010 list, China's Tianhe-1A, rated at 2.6 petaflop/s easily beat Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National laboratory with 1.75 petaflop/s.

The new "K Computer" smashes both of these with a benchmarked performance of 8.16 petaflop/s.  The system contains over half a million processor cores and is more powerful than the next five computers combined.  the name is derived from the Japanese word "kei" meaning 10^16 - a performance level it only just missed.

The current list contains just one computer from 2005 and 6 from 2006.  Slightly over half of the current list was commissioned in the current year.

For those interested in local systems, Peter Jackson's five identical HP systems no longer make the list, although there are six entries from Australia two of which were commissioned this year.

Over 470 of the systems run a Linux variant and of the remainder most are running some other form of Unix, with just six machines running Windows HPC Server 2008.  I wonder they're any faster at MineSweeper!

It is anticipated that K Computer's reign at the top will be short-lived as the Sequoia computer, boasting a targeted performance of 20 petaflop/s will soon be coming online at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - this computer is core to ongoing projects to dramatically reduce the amount of power required to run a supercomputer, being able to achieve a near ten-fold increase in efficiency (measured in megawatts per petaflop/s).