The DoE is partnering with a group of diverse American firms to share supercomputing time and find ways to optimize manufacturing and design processes. If the program works, it could be the beginning of a new type of performance scaling based on expanding shared knowledge rather than transistor frequency.
It’s that time of the year again: TOP500 published its twice-annual list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world today, and it looks like China’s Tianhe-2 is still on top — and for the sixth consecutive time).
While the US has plenty of representation in the current TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, it lost the #1 slot to China’s Tianhe-2 several years ago. President Obama wants to fix that immediately.
The results are in, and they’re not a huge surprise: For the fifth consecutive time, China’s Tianhe-2 remains the fastest supercomputer in the world, with the US bringing up the second and third spots.
Yesterday, Top 500 released the updated list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, and it revealed a rather worrying trend: Supercomputer performance is slowing down, rather than speeding up. When most of the world’s computing superpowers have announced their intentions to create exascale (1000 petaflops) supercomputers by 2020, this would appear to be a bit of a problem.