The June edition of the Top500 list is in the wild as of today; you can check it out at Top500.org. As you know we don’t spend too much time on the list here at insideHPC. I don’t object to the list itself, but I do believe that it has been allowed far too much importance in our community — I’ve worked with Congressmen and high-ranking government officials and corporate types, so yes I understand it’s utility in that regard, but that isn’t an excuse for us to allow the shorthand to replace real thinking.
Some things I noted in the new list:
The two systems from Germany — the upgraded JUGENE, scoring 825 TFLOPS at number 3 and JUROPA, scoring 245 TFLOPS at number 10 — are the only non-US systems in the Top10 (I have a feature interview running at HPCwire with the director of Jülich if you’d like more insight). The second 10 are a little more diverse, with five more systems (from Canada, Saudi Arabia, India, France, and China) rounding out the Top20.
The top two slots are unchanged with RoadRunner at number 1 and Jaguar holding on to number 2.
The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology commitment to an international position in technology is evident with their debut of an IBM BlueGene at number 14.
The southern hemisphere in general is still woefully under represented. According to the Top500 guys the US still leads with 291 systems, Europe is down slightly from 151 to 145, and Asia is essentially flat at 49.
In case you’re curious, my highest ranked system has fallen down to 67 from a high of 29 (it’s our Cray XT4).
