Examancer

I was glancing through the November 2008 TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful super computing sites, and noticed a few interesting details.

First I noticed that the US increased its dominance at the top of the list. The nine fastest super computing sites are all in the United States. You must go all the way to the tenth fastest to find a computing site outside of the United States. In the previous list (June 2008) the US still dominated, but Germany, France, and India all had computing sites in the top ten. With just six of ten fastest computing sites located in the US only six months ago, the nine out of ten score this time around is a significant improvement. The TOP500 list has been published twice a year since 1993 and looking through all the previous lists this is the most dominant the US has ever been in the top ten, and possibly overall.

The second interesting thing I noticed was that the tenth place site is located in China. This is only China’s second time being listed in the top ten (the last time was in June 2004), and they have yet to reach any higher on the list than tenth place.

However, what really caught my eye was the choice of operating systems in the top ten systems. All nine of the systems located in the US are using some flavor of Linux as their operating system. Linux is built by a community of volunteer programmers around the world and is often considered antithetical to commercial software. By association, some people believe Linux and the Open Source software movement are in direct opposition to capitalism. I found it both ironic and gratifying to see that the most commercial and capitalistic nation on earth is dominating the rankings of the world’s fastest computing sites using a product assumed to be at odds with both commercialism and capitalism. In an even more ironic twist of fate, The People’s Repulbic of China, whose communist leaders often insist on home grown solutions for many industries, are using a foreign commercial software stack to run their fastest computing site: Microsoft Windows HPC 2008.

Beyond being interesting, does this list offer any real economic, scientific, or political insight? Probably not. However, if it did, it appears the list would be saying that the United States is not loosing its relevance as the center of the information technology revolution as quickly as many have suggested. It might also be telling us that the United States is embracing “socialist”, “grassroots”, or “community” tools (when it comes to software) to a greater degree than many realize, and that China may be embracing capitalism and commercialism more quickly than we are often led to believe.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 4:12 pm and is filed under News and Opinion, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.