The latest list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, Top500 June 2015, shows the fastest of the fast growing ever more powerful. It also shows Linux is still number one with a bullet when it comes to supercomputing.
Overall, the total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 363 Petaflops per second (Pflop/s). Last November, the sum of all supercomputers hit 309 Pflop/s and a year ago it was “only” 274 Pflop/s. This performance is measured by the Linpack benchmark.
That may sound impressive, and it is, but it’s not as remarkable as it may seem. This increase in installed performance actually represents a noticeable slowdown in growth.
What seems to be happening is that countries and companies aren’t investing that much in the largest supercomputers. For example, the only new entry in the Top 10 supercomputers is Shaheen II, a Cray XC40 system installed at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, in the seventh spot. And, the fastest computer of them all, China’s National University of Defense Technology’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer? It’s still number one with the same performance it had when it first hit the charts in 2013.