Every six months, the folks at Top500.org put together what has become the most-recognized metric of supercomputing speed and power, the Top 500 list. While there’s ongoing debate about the meaning and value of a top 500 ranking, it’s proven to be the most often-cited guide to where the “big iron” really is — touted by vendors, researchers, agencies, even policymakers as a way to demonstrate their high-performance computing capabilities.
The newest ranking, released at this week’s SC07 conference in Reno, Nevada, struck me as noteworthy because of the sites ranked in the Top 5. In the last ranking back in June 2007, the top 5 sites were all in the U.S. — 4 DOE Labs and IBM’s Watson Research Center. In the latest ranking, only two U.S. sites rank in the top 5 — DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab (it’s BlueGene/L machine is #1) and the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (an SGI machine at #3). The other three are Germany’s Foshungszentrum Juelich (another BlueGene machine at #2), India’s Computational Research Laboratories (an HP cluster at #4), and a classified machine at a Swedish government agency (another HP cluster at #5).
I don’t want to draw any huge conclusions from this about the state of U.S. HPC efforts — after all, all the machines in the top 5 (indeed in the Top 15) are manufactured by U.S.-based companies (though the Indian machine apparently makes use of their own “innovative routing technology”). But if nothing else, this appears to demonstrate a commitment by these other countries — all competitors in the global economy — to really strong investments in HPC technologies. It represents further capacity-building on their part, the recognition that in order to compete, they must compute (to steal a catchphrase from the Council on Competitiveness).
As we look for ways to benchmark U.S. competitiveness and judge where future trends will take us, taking note of our competitors investments in high-performance computing ought to factor in pretty heavily, I think. That said, the U.S. continues to do pretty well in investing in HPC.