How will we keep supercomputing super?

Tue, 11/17/2009 - 22:24 - NLN

Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer is the fastest machine on the planet, according to the Top 500 list of supercomputers published today by four researchers in the computing industry.

It marks the first time that Jaguar beat out IBM’s Roadrunner on a performance basis, achieving 2.3 petaflops, or about 2 million billion calculations a second. However, a deeper look at the list shows that the trend in supercomputing is not only one of faster machines, but a steady erosion of how super supercomputing actually is, as exemplified by dedicated vendors such as SiCortex being shut down and venerable players like SGI filing for bankruptcy before then getting acquired.