Japan claims top supercomputer spot
Japan's K Computer, which can crunch more than eight quadrillion calculations per second, is the world's top supercomputer, according to the latest Top 500 list of high-performance systems.
The K Computer, housed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, puts Japan back in the top spot for the first time since November 2004.
Australia's top computer, coming in at number 62, was the Oracle set-up at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)'s National Facility. iVEC clocked in at 102, the CSIRO's GPU cluster at 273, the Bureau of Meteorology at 313. Two further CSIRO clusters came in at 433 and 434.
On Monday, the Top 500 list was outlined at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg. These systems are ranked based on their Linpack scores, an application designed to solve dense linear equations.
The biggest takeaway on the list is that a system needs to operate at a petaflop-per-second scale to break the top 10. The US has five systems operating at a petaflop scale; Japan and China have two each, and France has just one.
Japan's K Computer bumped the previous top dog — China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer. The K Computer is built by Fujitsu and has 548,352 cores, or 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs with eight cores each. It's also notable that the K Computer doesn't use graphics processors or accelerators.
The top 10 of the Top 500 list. (Credit: Top500.org)
Other odds and ends:
- China has 62 systems in the Top 500 list to be number two to the US
- Intel has 77.4 per cent of the systems in the list
- Quad-core processors are used in 46.2 per cent of the systems, with 42.4 per cent using six or more cores
- Nvidia GPUs power 19 systems in the list
Via ZDNet US