C&L_December 2017 (1)
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Insight<br />
Measuring the Speed of Speed<br />
How fast is today’s fastest supercomputer? According to<br />
November <strong>2017</strong> Top 500 list, it is 93 petaFLOPS—that is 93<br />
million billion floating point operations per second. This is<br />
200 times faster than the fastest supercomputer in November<br />
2007 and 1.6 million times faster than the fastest supercomputer<br />
in June 1993, when the list made its debut.<br />
The Acceleration<br />
How fast have been the fastest (all figures in TFLOPs/second)<br />
33862.7<br />
33862.7<br />
93014.6<br />
478.2<br />
1759 10510<br />
Nov_07 Nov_09 Nov_11 Nov_13 Nov_15 Nov_17<br />
Global Power Shift<br />
Like in many other things in business and economy, in<br />
supercomputing too, the action has shifted from America<br />
and Europe to Asia Pacific.<br />
The Chinese Invasion<br />
Supercomputing is the latest area where China overthrows the US<br />
from top even as India's presence is further marginalized<br />
283<br />
144<br />
10<br />
4<br />
9<br />
Nov_07 Nov_09 Nov_11 Nov_13 Nov_15 Nov_17<br />
China US India<br />
Power of the Cluster<br />
In terms of the architecture, there is a clear shift to clusterbased<br />
supercomputing. Almost nine out of ten Top500<br />
supercomputing sites are cluster-based.<br />
The Definite Shift to Clusters<br />
Cluster<br />
MRP<br />
202<br />
The Asian Edge<br />
Supercomputing power too shifts to Asia, driven by China;<br />
India's rise could push it further<br />
289<br />
287<br />
274<br />
277<br />
212<br />
109<br />
149<br />
93<br />
The Manufacturers’ Story<br />
While Cray still remains the supercomputing company, with<br />
shrinking share of MPP architecture, Cray’s share in Top<br />
500 is coming down, even though it still accounts for more<br />
than one third of Top 50 sites. Lenovo and a host of Chinese<br />
manufacturers show up on the radar, thanks to China’s rise<br />
in supercomputer usage.<br />
103 102<br />
150 152<br />
257<br />
179<br />
122 121<br />
60 60<br />
Manufacturer's Share<br />
Nov_07 Nov_09 Nov_11 Nov_13 Nov_15 Nov_17<br />
Lenovo completes China story<br />
Asia -Oceania Europe Americas<br />
China is the New Supercomputing<br />
Superpower<br />
The big rise of Asia in the supercomputing scene is almost<br />
entirely because of the rise of China—and despite the fall of<br />
other Asian contenders like Japan and India.<br />
In fact, it is a big shift that happened in the latest Top<br />
500 list. For the first time, China replaced the US as the<br />
top supercomputing country accounting for more Top500<br />
supercomputer sites than the US.<br />
India has been reduced to a marginal player with just four<br />
of the Top500 fastest sites present in the country. That is a<br />
drop from 12 such sites that it had just four years back.<br />
2% 9%<br />
2%<br />
24%<br />
3%<br />
14%<br />
3% 20%<br />
4%<br />
4%<br />
4%<br />
4% Top 50<br />
8%<br />
10%<br />
4%<br />
10%<br />
11%<br />
11%<br />
36%<br />
16%<br />
HPE Lenovo Inspur Cray Inc. Sugon<br />
Huawei IBM Bull Dell EMC Fujitsu<br />
<strong>December</strong> <strong>2017</strong> | CIO&LEADER<br />
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