YAT500: Yet Another Top500 list

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That’s right, the testosterone of the world continues to be increasing segmented, with regions and even countries (in the case of the Russia Top50) developing their own TopX lists. It’s a shame to see that as supercomputing spreads to new regions of the world they aren’t taking a fresh start opportunity to use something that’s more representative than the HPL. The lure of a single number is just too much I guess.

So who’s on tap with their own list this time? The Asia Top500 published its first list yesterday. The list runs on a Top500 model, with publication twice a year (October and April) during GITEX exhibition in Riyadh and Dubai. The top two systems on the first list are in Saudi Arabia and China

The October 2009 list has been published in the Asian Top500 supercomputers site. With no surprise, the Shaheen supercomputer at King Abdullah University for Science and Technology takes the first position in the list, achieving 185 TeraFlops in compute power.

In the second place of October list is the notable Magic Cube supercomputer, installed at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center in China. The Magic Cube operates with 30720 cores, achieving 180 Teraflops and running Windows 2008 HPC as the operating system.

So far there are only 45 systems on the Top500 Asia list — nothing wrong with being ambitious I guess. 15 of the 45 systems are in China; peak RMax is 185 TF, and the minimum system on the list is 9 TF. All of the Asia Top10 systems also appear on the Top500, at which point I got bored with comparing back and forth.