Japan's K Computer still tops the Top500 list

David Heath
Wednesday, 16 November 2011 12:58

IT Industry - Development

For the first time ever, the Top Ten supercomputer list remains unchanged from the previous list.  Some have improved their overall performance, but none changed positions.

With the latest Top500 list published and an identical top 10, this means that Japan's K Computer is still the world's top supercomputer, and this time, it's bigger and better.

When the previous list was published, the K Computer had not been fully completed and it's benchmark was based on preliminary results, but even then, it was significantly faster than the previous record-holder, China's Tianhe-1A.

Six months ago, K Computer was rated at 8.16 petaflop/s, beating Tianhe-1A at 2.16 petaflop/s and Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory at 1.75 petaflop/s.  The latest list has K Computer at 10.51, the others are essentially unchanged.

The list was released on perhaps the most binary of dates possible.  The timestamp on the press release was 11:11am on 11th November 2011.  It's nice to see the Top500 team has a sense of humour.

The K computer, jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, is part of the High-Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) initiative led by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).  The K computer has 864 computer racks equipped with a total of 88,128 CPUs.