Who has the most powerful computers in the world?

From the www.top500.org site is the following table as of Nov. 2009.

Rank	System	Description
1	Ok Ridge National Laboratory, United States	Jaguar - Cray XT5-HE Opteron Six Core 2.6 GHz Cray Inc.
2	DOE/NNSA/LANL, United States	Roadrunner - BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband IBM
3	National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee United States	Kraken XT5 - Cray XT5-HE Opteron Six Core 2.6 GHz Cray Inc.
4	Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) Germany	JUGENE - Blue Gene/P Solution IBM
5	National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin/NUDT China	Tianhe-1 - NUDT TH-1 Cluster, Xeon E5540/E5450, ATI Radeon HD 4870 2, Infiniband NUDT
6	NASA/Ames Research Center/NAS United States	Pleiades - SGI Altix ICE 8200EX, Xeon QC 3.0 GHz/Nehalem EP 2.93 Ghz SGI
7	DOE/NNSA/LLNL United States	BlueGene/L - eServer Blue Gene Solution IBM
8	Argonne National Laboratory United States	Blue Gene/P Solution IBM
9	Texas Advanced Computing Center/Univ. of Texas United States	Ranger - SunBlade x6420, Opteron QC 2.3 Ghz, Infiniband Sun Microsystems
10	Sandia National Laboratories / National Renewable Energy Laboratory United States	Red Sky - Sun Blade x6275, Xeon X55xx 2.93 Ghz, Infiniband Sun Microsystems

The rankings are based on some benchmarks like LINPACK which measures the number of floating point operations per second. The fastest or #1 on the list has rating of 1.75 petaflop/s performance. A petaflop is 10¹² operations per second.

Now, buying a supercomputer just to be in the top500 list with all the hardware, maintenance and software support is out of the question for the Philippines at the moment. Such vain attempts is a waste of money and instead, we should concentrate on developing parallel computing programmers and system administration.

It is worth noting that the first and third most powerful computers are XT5 systems from Cray,Inc. a company which was descended from the original companies founded by Seymour Cray a former supercomputer designer from CDC or Control Data Corporation.


The United States dominates the field by having eight out of 10 sytems. Only Germany and China are the other countries in the list.

Also Japan is not on the list, but the impetus for the US preeminence in the supercomputing field was the NEC Climate Supersimulator which remained #1 for a few years, bringing fear to the U.S. of losing its technological edge and which spurred a furious pace of research and development in supercomputing. The result was that IBM brought the supercomputing prestige back to the U.S. thru its introduction of the ASCI Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative RED computer serving Sandia and which was decommissioned in 2008. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red .