Home-cooked tech helps China topple US as top supercomputer user

For the first time since the Top 500 rankings of the most powerful supercomputers in the world was started 23 years ago, the United States is not home to the largest number of machines on the list – and China, after decades of intense investment and engineering, is. Supercomputing is not just an academic or government …

[Anonymous Coward]

Botnets

It'd be interesting if any of the larger botnets out there ran the Linpack benchmark on their er... botnet and posted the results for comparison purposes.

[Mike Shepherd]

Confusion

"It has been a long time since the United States did not have at least half the machines on the list..."

Probably "did not have" should be "had". There is no beauty in such complicated constructions. Here, the meaning is not just obscure, but reversed.

[David Knapman]

Re: Confusion

No, *you've* reversed what they're saying.

For a long time, the US have had at least half of the machines on the list. Only in the last two years have they dropped to below half.

[frymaster]

Did someone win a bet for that pie chart?

....because that's the only reason I can think of for those colour choices...

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: Did someone win a bet for that pie chart?

Seems to be a Pumpkin-Piechart... (but with Halloween another 4 months away?)

Also, surprised to see the name 'Bull' on the chart. I wasn't aware they were still around.

[Mike 16]

Re: Bull

Last (only really) Bull machine I ever used (stretching that word a bit, I was testing a driver) was a 6U Itanium system running Suse Linux. Perhaps its descendants still exist.

Of course, those of us of a certain age may recall the Gamma 60. That was quite an architectural leap.

BTW: in a "how they have fallen" moment, the spelling checker in this comment form does not recognize "Itanium"

[vir]

Re: Did someone win a bet for that pie chart?

That pie chart looks like a colorblindness simulation.

[earlyberd]

Bad news for X86.

And probably good news for ARM. Even if the Chinese are using their own chips, I doubt that they would have invented a completely new architecture for this. The Chinese have a ton of experience with ARM thanks to producing the iPhone and its knockoffs, and so it was only a matter of time before they would start building their own server chips instead of importing from America or Taiwan.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bad news for X86.

Did you even read the article? :(