While the U.S. is the current leader in the installation and use of high-performance computing systems, the last decade has seen a sharp increase in HPC usage in the rest of the world.
Click to see an interactive map of the world’s fastest supercomputers from the New York Times.
And for good reason. In an increasingly interconnected world, society needs answers that go beyond national boundaries and address the pressing issues that face us all.
To combat global warming, predict and prepare for tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes, find a cure for AIDS and other infectious diseases, and discover new, clean energy solutions, we need the combined efforts of the world’s best minds…and most powerful supercomputers.
To that end, Europe and the Asian nations of China, India, and Saudi Arabia are entering the HPC fold. Almost half (210) of the top 500 supercomputers — based on the benchmarking results at www.top500.org — are now outside the U.S. International computing systems hold eight of the Top20 HPC positions and are developing unique solutions to technological, industrial, social, and scientific problems.
Researchers from the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, The University of Texas at Austin, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), are taking a leadership role in this age of global HPC.
- In August 2007, TACC founded the Global Academic Supercomputing Consortium (GASC), whose second annual meeting during SC08 discussed diverse efforts to predict, plan for, and avert natural disasters. [see article]
- Mary Wheeler, director of the Center for Subsurface Modeling at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), served as the keynote speaker at the 2008 International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC).
- Omar Ghattas, director of the Center for Computational Geosciences at ICES is playing a key role in establishing the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) — Saudi Arabia’s first bold step into the HPC world.
Together, TACC, TeraGrid and The University of Texas at Austin are broadening the capabilities of other nations by helping establish new institutions, and uniting HPC’s leading minds worldwide to tackle the toughest issues of the 21st century.
The time has come to support HPC not only for national competitiveness, but also for the global good.
