Latest rankings show US and China tied on supercomputer count

Twice a year, the Top500 list outlines the world’s most powerful supercomputers, and the US has always held the title of most units in that list – that is, until it was knocked off its perch by China back in June. With the latest rankings released this week, the former champion is clawing its way back to the top, with the US and China now tied for 171 systems each within the top 500.

More…

https://www.top500.org/news/global-supercomputing-capacity-creeps-up-as-petascale-systems-blanket-top-100/

from link

After US and China, Germany claims the most systems with 31, followed by Japan with 27, France with 20, and the UK with 13. A year ago the US was the clear leader with 200 systems, while China had 108, Japan had 37, Germany had 33, and both France and the UK had 18.

In addition to matching each other in system count in the latest rankings, China and the US are running neck and neck in aggregate Linpack performance. The US holds the narrowest of leads, with 33.9 percent of the total; China is second with 33.3 percent. The total performance of all 500 computers on the list is now 672 petaflops, a 60 percent increase from a year ago.

CrazyNeutrino said:

Latest rankings show US and China tied on supercomputer count

Twice a year, the Top500 list outlines the world’s most powerful supercomputers, and the US has always held the title of most units in that list – that is, until it was knocked off its perch by China back in June. With the latest rankings released this week, the former champion is clawing its way back to the top, with the US and China now tied for 171 systems each within the top 500.

More…

https://www.top500.org/news/global-supercomputing-capacity-creeps-up-as-petascale-systems-blanket-top-100/

Supercomputer count, yes, but not supercomputer power.

China’s fastest supercomputer, with a speed of 93,014.6 teraflops per second is 5.3 times as fast as the fastest computer in the USA.

China also has the advantage in power efficiency, China’s fastest computer uses less than two times as much power as the USA’s fastest.

Position on list of fastest computer, by country:
1 China
3 USA
6 Japan
8 Switzerland – huh?
11 UK
12 Italy
14 Germany
15 Saudi Arabia – that comes as a surprise
16 Italy

Then no new countries until

46 Korea
52 Russia
59 Poland
67 Czech
81 Finland
95 Australia

The Australian one is:
Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, Kensington, Western Australia
Magnus – Cray XC40, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Aries interconnect , Cray Inc.

Australia’s other fast computers are
121 at the ANU.
198 at “Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative”

97 Netherlands
115 Singapore
129 Spain
139 Sweden
161 South Africa
193 India
246 Austria
264 India
274 New Zealand – owned by Animation studio WETA.
277 Belgium
355 Denmark
364 Brazil
441 Norway

Australia is doing much better than I expected, not too many years ago it had dropped off the top 500 list completely.

Missing from the list is Canada, if I was Canadian than I’d be a bit upset about that.

Full list at https://www.top500.org/list/2016/11/

I strongly suspect that some of the world’s fastest computers are missing from this list. For example, Google has consistently refused to say how big or fast its computers are. Google’s storage capacity is something in the order of 20-30 million times that of a typical desktop computer. If that’s equivalent to 20 to 30 million cores, then that would make Google’s data centre the biggest computer in the world. Even splitting that into 15 separate installations and assuming a 5:1 ratio of storage to speed, at least one of the Google servers must be in the top ten fastest computers in the world, but I don’t see it on the list. This also roughly agrees with Wikipedia’s estimate of Google’s combined processing power of 20 to 100 petaflops and power consumption of in 2008, and 500 and 681 megawatts in 2010.

This web article has many photos and a video of some of Google’s computer centres.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2219188/Inside-Google-pictures-gives-look-8-vast-data-centres.html

eg. This is one of Google’s computers.

https://www.google.com.au/about/datacenters/gallery/#/

They’d be better off teaching them binary maths first, the coding can come later.

The Pawsey Centre comprises two buildings. These are the data centre and plant area. The data centre comprises a 1000 square metre whitespace that is partitioned into three areas; a visualisation room; exhibition area and office space. The plant building contains most equipment associated with power, cooling, and the uninterruptable power supply (UPS).