Asia back on top 10 supercomp list
India has been crowned Asia's fastest supercomputer, marking the first time the country takes a seat on the list of world's top 10 fastest machines.
Housed at Tata Group's Computational Research Laboratories in Pune, the India-based system, ranks No. 4 on the latest Top500 list unveiled Monday at the Supercomputing Conference (SC07) in Reno, Nevada.
The biannual Top500 list--updated in June and November each year--measures the world's fastest supercomputers based on the Linpack benchmark, which focuses on solving linear equations.
Installed by Hewlett-Packard in 2007, the system clocks in at 117.9 teraflops and was integrated with Tata's in-house routing technology. It encompasses a cluster of HP's Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c, with 14,240 Intel's Xeon 53xx 3GHz processors and an InfiniBand interconnect.
The supercomputer housed at Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology was the previous speediest high-performance computing (HPC) system in Asia, and was ranked No. 14 in June this year. The Japanese system dropped two spots to No. 16 on the latest Top500 list.
According to the new top 500 ranking, the United States--at 284 systems--still has dominant ownership of supercomputers, followed by Europe at 149 systems, up from 127 systems in June this year.
Asia's share of HPC systems has dwindled further, from 72 systems in June 2007 to 58 systems. The region's biggest hosts of supercomputers are:
- Japan with 20 systems, down from its previous 23;
- Taiwan with 11 systems, up from its previous 10;
- China with 10 systems, down from its previous 13; and
- India with nine systems, up from its previous eight.