US Regains Supercomputing Crown, Besting China and Japan

dcblogs writes "The U.S., once again, is home to the world's most powerful supercomputer after being knocked off the list by China two years ago and Japan last year. The top computer, an IBM system at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is capable of 16.32 sustained petaflops, according to the Top 500 list, a global, twice a year ranking, released Monday. Despite the continuing strength of U.S. vendors globally, when China's supercomputer took the top position in June, 2010, it seemed to hit a national nerve. President Barack Obama mentioned China's top ranked supercomputer in two separate speeches, including his State of the Union address last year."

Conspiracy Nut

[ciderbrew]

Each time I read a story like this I can't help think there are a bunch of faster machines that they don't tell us about.

Re:What happens to the "obsolete" supercomputers?

[samilliken]

The CRAY supercomputers are actually blade chassis, so you can do several generations of upgrades just by updating the blades. When we do have a to replace more components, the old parts are shipped back to CRAY for recycling. When the upgrade is more of a forklift upgrade, we will sometimes run them in parallel. This is what happened between Jaguar and Jaguar-PF. Jaguar was sent back to CRAY last year so that we can make room for whatever will replace Titan (the blade level upgrade of Jaguar-PF). We have about 10 on-site CRAYons at all times at ORNL, and when we have a large upgrade process happening, extras are brought in. At some point you do have to look at the Watts/Flop of the old systems, and you will get to a tipping point where it's simply too costly to continue running on the old equipment. When you're pulling down systems measured in Megawatts, you have to.