Whose Computer Is Fastest of All?
Japan has ousted the United States and jumped to first in the latest ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers. Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, has been tracking the progress of the world's best number-crunching machines since 1993. Twice a year, he publishes a list of the 500 champs (see www.top500.org). He gives each computer a set of linear equations to solve. The rate at which it solves them—expressed in floating-point operations per second—determines which machine is fastest. The Earth Simulator in Japan, which can perform nearly 36 trillion calculations in one second, tops the list. The top 10:
- Five times faster than number 2, the NEC-built Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan, models terrestrial climate and plate tectonics. Speed: 35.86 teraflops (trillion operations per second).
- Two years old and at the top of the list just seven months ago, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's ASCI White simulates the aging of U.S. stockpiled nuclear weapons. Speed: 7.23 teraflops.
- The LeMieux ("the best") supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center tackles academic calculations for researchers affiliated with the National Science Foundation. Speed: 4.46 teraflops.
- France's Atomic Energy Commission employs a Tera supercomputer to ensure the safety and reliability of the country's nuclear weapons arsenal. Speed: 3.98 teraflops.
- The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's supercomputer handles research projects ranging from software design to alternative patterns of gene splicing. Speed: 3.05 teraflops.
- Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers use their new supercomputer to conduct nuclear simulations. Speed: 2.92 teraflops.
- ASCI Red—the older, weaker sibling of ASCI White—also ensures the safety of the nation's nuclear stockpile. Speed: 2.38 teraflops.
- Cheetah, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new supercomputer, recently ran a new climate simulation model for scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Speed: 2.31 teraflops.
- The third member of Livermore's ASCI family, ASCI Blue, also runs nuclear weapons aging simulations. Speed: 2.14 teraflops.
- At the IBM/U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Poughkeepsie, New York, an IBM pSeries 690 Turbo supercomputer is used for weapons development. Speed: 2.00 teraflops.
|Livermore's ASCI White—the former supercomputer champ—can hold six times as much data as all the books in the Library of Congress.|
Photograph courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
"Whose Computer Is Fastest of All?." Find a list of the top 500 supercomputers at www.top500.org.