US supercomputing receives multifaceted boost

For several years, notably since Japan´s NEC Earth Simulator earned the top spot on the list of the world´s fastest computers, the US-based high-performance computing community has warned that the federal government´s lagging interest and investment could cause serious long-term consequences for both the public and private sectors in the US. Apparently, those warnings haven´t gone entirely unheeded. In November 2004, US-based supercomputing received both psychological and financial reinforcement. IBM´s Blue Gene/L wrested the top spot on the global Top 500 supercomputer list (www.top500.org) from NEC with a performance rate of 70 teraflops per second. A second US-based computer, a cluster built by SGI and owned by NASA, took the second-place spot with 51 teraflops. In addition, federal officials demonstrated a willingness to invest across the range of high-performance architectures, from cluster interconnect technology to top-end shared-memory computers.