A new list of the top 500 supercomputers reveals only one homegrown machine makes the grade — a HP SuperDome 875MHz HyperPlex 192 at the “New Zealand Dairy Board” (now part of Fonterra) reaches number 273.
Massey University’s 200-gigaflop machine (see DIY supercomputer puts Massey on map) is a midget to some of these monsters, the top of the list a 35.9-teraflop NEC machine sited at the Earth Simulator Centre in Japan.
While only one is here, five are in Australia — about equivalent on a population basis.
The US houses exactly half of the supercomputers, trailed by Germany, Japan and the UK.
HP, followed by IBM, head the list of computer families that run the supercomputers and 119 are Intel machines.