C&L_December 2017 (1)

Insight
Measuring the Speed of Speed
How fast is today’s fastest supercomputer? According to
November 2017 Top 500 list, it is 93 petaFLOPS—that is 93
million billion floating point operations per second. This is
200 times faster than the fastest supercomputer in November
2007 and 1.6 million times faster than the fastest supercomputer
in June 1993, when the list made its debut.
The Acceleration
How fast have been the fastest (all figures in TFLOPs/second)
33862.7
33862.7
93014.6
478.2
1759 10510
Nov_07 Nov_09 Nov_11 Nov_13 Nov_15 Nov_17
Global Power Shift
Like in many other things in business and economy, in
supercomputing too, the action has shifted from America
and Europe to Asia Pacific.
The Chinese Invasion
Supercomputing is the latest area where China overthrows the US
from top even as India's presence is further marginalized
283
144
10
4
9
Nov_07 Nov_09 Nov_11 Nov_13 Nov_15 Nov_17
China US India
Power of the Cluster
In terms of the architecture, there is a clear shift to clusterbased
supercomputing. Almost nine out of ten Top500
supercomputing sites are cluster-based.
The Definite Shift to Clusters
Cluster
MRP
202
The Asian Edge
Supercomputing power too shifts to Asia, driven by China;
India's rise could push it further
289
287
274
277
212
109
149
93
The Manufacturers’ Story
While Cray still remains the supercomputing company, with
shrinking share of MPP architecture, Cray’s share in Top
500 is coming down, even though it still accounts for more
than one third of Top 50 sites. Lenovo and a host of Chinese
manufacturers show up on the radar, thanks to China’s rise
in supercomputer usage.
103 102
150 152
257
179
122 121
60 60
Manufacturer's Share
Nov_07 Nov_09 Nov_11 Nov_13 Nov_15 Nov_17
Lenovo completes China story
Asia -Oceania Europe Americas
China is the New Supercomputing
Superpower
The big rise of Asia in the supercomputing scene is almost
entirely because of the rise of China—and despite the fall of
other Asian contenders like Japan and India.
In fact, it is a big shift that happened in the latest Top
500 list. For the first time, China replaced the US as the
top supercomputing country accounting for more Top500
supercomputer sites than the US.
India has been reduced to a marginal player with just four
of the Top500 fastest sites present in the country. That is a
drop from 12 such sites that it had just four years back.
2% 9%
2%
24%
3%
14%
3% 20%
4%
4%
4%
4% Top 50
8%
10%
4%
10%
11%
11%
36%
16%
HPE Lenovo Inspur Cray Inc. Sugon
Huawei IBM Bull Dell EMC Fujitsu
December 2017 | CIO&LEADER
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