The9 exposed as China's supercomputing powerhouse

For more than six months, a list ranking the top supercomputers in China has been floating around, but no one has managed to solve its riddle. The list begins much like any other supercomputer ranking. IBM built the top system, which is a cluster of servers running on Xeon chips from Intel. An oil company - China Petroleum and …

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous machines

A few rich fanboys custom-built machines used to play Crysis on the highest settings?

[Solomon Grundy]

So-Called

That's a tired and somewhat conspiratorial term. I hope that author of this article has learned the error of his ways and will desist in using this term so often.

[Dr Patrick J R Harkin]

@Solomon Grundy

I assume you mean the "so called" author of this "so called" article.

[Anton Ivanov]

I would expect them to be anonymous

China governmentcritters still frown on gaming so a company that is making a living off gaming is likely to be considerably less loud about its success than its EU/US counterparts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably...

...this list only comprises non-governmental machines, though, and so we have no way of knowing what hardware is being used in the Great Firewall of China and how that relates to the privately owned gear. Shame

[Steve Briggs]

Large clusters

In the Oil & Gas sector there are a lot of JBOPs - Just a Bunch of Processors. 20K and more are not unusual for the seismic processing shops. Because much of what they do is extremely parallel, they don't have IB 8x hookup or the like, thus no one bothers to really calculate the Linpac numbers, ergo, no membership on T500.

[Matt Bryant]

US WoW kit.....

Blizzard not telling you? Then I couldn't possibly let on that the Chinese may have used a standard build as used by Blizzard in the US.... allegedly! Not that I was told by Blizzard admin over some beers at a well-known Palo Alto-based company's event in Vegas. No sirree!

Now, does anyone know what the Sony Evercrack server set up is?