The November 2013 edition of the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers has just been released. Known as the TOP500 List, it is released twice a year, first in June, then in November.
The TOP500 List began in June 1993, ran again in November of that year and has been repeated in that order since. The November 2013 edition is the 42nd.
This latest edition is not that much different from the previous edition, which was also topped by the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which is built and maintained by China’s National University of Defense Technology
. It retained its top spot “with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second).” Folks, that’s fast, and impressive.
What’s also impressive about the latest TOP500 List is that 482 of the supercomputers run one version of Linux or the other. That’s more than 96%. Only two, ranked 237 and 309, run a Windows operating system. Eleven run IBM’s AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) OS, and four run a mixed CNK/SLES 9 (Computer Node Kernel and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server). Only one runs Super-UX, a BSD-based operating system.
This image shows the top 10 supercomputers in the TOP500 List and the OS each runs. You may read the official announcement of the TOP500 List.
