The worlds top 500 Supercomputers list is out again. There has been no change in the top spot. The fastest and strongest supercomputer in the world is still Chinese:
http://www.top500.org/list/2014/06/The Tianhe-2 is still on top:
And it is operated by
Kylin LinuxIt has 3,120,000 (!) cores.
It is fancy to have the top spot, but it is also interesting to see how many Supercomputers the different countries have.
The USA have always had the most supercomputers but their share is dropping below 50 % from 265 to 233 systems since November last year.
The number of Chinese systems are growing from 63 to 76.
Then we have the UK and Japan with 30 systems each.
France has 27 supercomputers.
Germany has 23.
These numbers are not 100% reliable since supercomputers are often used by governmental agencies who prefer to keep things secret.
The list contains only what they care to report.
The Cray computer in the 10th spot is used by the US government - but it is not reported what it is used for.
(Tech and privacy minded people might have a pretty good idea though)
Intel is supplying processors to 85,4 % of the systems. AMD has dropped from 9 to 6 % and IBM power-processor is stable with 8 %.
It is very obvious that all the processors in the supercomputer world are delivered by American companies.
Hardware
tampering on the processor level is almost impossible to discover and must create some headaches in other countries; given the US governments attitude towards "foreigners".