Building Them Faster and Stronger

Top 500

Top 500 is a ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputers that is updated ever six months. Since last year, I've been keeping track of how much faster the computers on the list are getting. Of course it would take too long to look at all the computers. What I do is find the average speed of the top 10 and bottom 10 and compare it to the previous year.

Up until this year, both were averaging speed increases of 40% every six months, however, the June '06 list showed poor performance, with the top 10 increasing their speed by only 8%, the worst performance since the list started in '93. November's list shows improvement, but it's still below the average, with the top 10 increasing by 18% and the bottom top increasing by 35%.

Part of the reason for the low growth, at least in the top 10, is that it is usually driven by the speed of the top computer, but the current top computer, Blue Gene, was completed in November '05. I've heard mention that a computer to overtake Blue Gene is being built, but I think it was several years away from completion.

Because of the growth slowdown, my prediction for when the top 10 average exceeds 1 petaflop has been moved from June to November 2010. By 2012, the bottom 10 computers should be faster than the current top 10.

Also, apparently a 2GHz computer can calculate more than one GFLOPS, which would make my laptop comparable to the top 100 supercomputers of June '93.