Top Supercomputers November 2008

Every year, a project named TOP500 releases two list of top 500 most powerful supercomputers – one in June and the other one in November.

They have recently released a top 500 super computer list. In June’s list, there were six super computers from usa, whereas they have nine super computers in the new list. An interesting fact is, India’s TATA owns the most powerful commercially available super computer (Eka- means “lonely”) in the world. Well, in June’s list, that was the fastest super computer in Asia; which is now taken by China’s Shanghai Super Computer Center (only non-usa super computer in the new top 10) and they went down to 13th in world ranking from 4th. However, their website still claims the old record.

In Canada, the fastest super computer owner is University of Toronto (ranked 53 and one of the two super computers from Canada in this top 500 list).   The owner of the second one is Environment Canada (ranked 154th).

IBM and Cray Supercomputer are still leading vendors of the top super computers. A ranking by number is given below (total 32 vendors):

1. HP (209 systems/ 42% of overall)

2. IBM (186 systems/ 37% of overall)

3. Cray (22 systems/ 4.4%)

4. Dell (19/ 3.8%)

5. SGI (17/  3.4%)

By number, country-ranking (total 31 countries):

1. USA – 290 systems

2. UK – 45 systems

3. France – 26 systems

4. Germany – 25 systems

5. Japan – 18 systems

The next list will be published in June 2009 at ISC 09, Hamburg, Germany.

These numbers demonstrate some really interesting facts. However, in the war of super computers, there are some developing countries are ahead in the list. This is regardlessly a positive sign.