Top 500
Although Jaguar finally became the fastest computer, the change among the entire top 500 was rather low. The former fastest computer, Roadrunner, actually got slower, which is something I've never seen happen before. Whereas in previous lists, almost half the list would be new computers, there were only 165 new computers this time. Overall, this past six months, the overall FLOPS calculated by all 500 computers only increased 24%, the lowest increase since June 2006. The average is around 36%.
In theory I thought of to explain this slowdown came from an article I saw about Japan cutting funding to supercomputer programs. Albeit, only 16 computers on the list are Japanese, so by itself that wouldn't change much. However, it's likely that other countries have cut funding as well.
Still, 24% is not bad growth, Jaguar is now more powerful than all 500 supercomputers from June 2005 combined. BlueGene, which held the top spot for over 3 years is now 7th. While the epically named Earth Simulator built in 2002 would be 155th, if it were still listed.
No comments:
Post a Comment