BF2S Forums Supercomputing superpowers

Which country has the most powerful supercomputers? If you trust the annual top 500 list, recently published at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, it’s the U.S., followed by China, Germany, United Kingdom and France.

The list is voluntary and thus doesn’t include classified supercomputers owned by governments, which means that the real list can be quite different, depending on your favorite conspiracy theory.

The fastest supercomputer in the world is Cray’s Jaguar, and it’s located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. It crunches 1.75 petaflop/s running the Linpack benchmark, a standard measurement for very, very fast computing. The second on the list is China’s new supercomputer Nebulae, with a Linpack performance of 1.271 petaflop/s. For comparison, Intel’s Core i7 980 XE has a theoretical peak performance of 107.55 gigaflop/s – many orders of magnitude slower.

You can now easily browse the top 500 supercomputers on the list via this handy, interactive infographic by BBC. Move the mouse over it to see the speed, name, location and the number of cores for individual supercomputers.

The biannual Top 500 supercomputer list has been released.  Use this graphic to explore the world's fastest number crunchers or find out more about alternative supercomputer powers.

The data used to generate the interactive treemap visualisation come from a draft of the June 2010 TOP500 Supercomputing list. This ranks most of the world's fastest supercomputers twice a year. There may be minor differences between this list and the final published list.

The graphic allows you to visualise the list by the speed of each machine; the operating systems used; what it is used for; the country where it is based; the maker of the silicon chips used to build the machine and the manufacturer of the super computer.

The maps were produced using the Prefuse Flare software, developed by the University of California Berkeley.