Will industry take over the TOP500 eventually?

Mannheim, 18 June 98 Up to now, research centres were housing by far the most supercomputers from the TOP500 fastest machines in the world. In the new TOP500 list presented at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar, this position is challenged now by industry. In companies, 178 TOP500 class supercomputers can be found, as oppossed to 180 in research centres. For the first time ever, universities own less than 100 supercomputers: 94. The other categories are classified with 35 and vendors with 13 machines.

When analysed in more detail, it shows that research centres still have the bigger machines. About 50% of the installed TOP500 class computing power world wide is located in research institutes. Universities house 17% of the Rmax power and industry 16%.

Looking at the applications and machines, many industrial centres run SUN systems and many run commercial applications, as opposed to traditional simulation applications on SGI/Cray and Japanese machines.

The trend, however, shows that HPCN has found its way into other application areas and other types of companies. In Europe, industry already topped research with 37 machines, opposed to 36. Leading in this continent, however, are the universities with 38 installations.

Another trend is that concerning processor technology, CMOS off-the-shelf (the standard PC or Workstation chips) is completely dominating. Threehundred machines are built with that technology. Good old ECL (the expensive, difficult to cool stuff where the first supercomputers were made of) has declined to 132 machines. Proprietary CMOS (build your own uncompatible with anything PC/workstation chip especially designed to be used in a supercomputer) is down to 47 systems.

Ad Emmen