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BERKELEY, Calif.; KNOXVILLE, Tenn.; and MANNHEIM, Germany (Nov. 14, 2011)—Japan’s “K Computer” maintained its position atop the newest edition of the TOP500 List of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, thanks to a full build-out that makes it four times as powerful as its nearest competitor. Installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, the K Computer it achieved an impressive 10.51 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.

In this video, John West, Director of the DoD HPC Modernization Program discusses the TOP500 list and how HPC users need to better communicate the benefits of high performance computing.

Supercomputers powerful enough to simulate the human brain will be developed within seven years, a leading supercomputer expert has predicted.

Professor Hans Werner Meuer, co-founder of the Top500 list of supercomputers, said that computers capable of processing a million trillion calculations a second would be available by 2019.

Intel causes confusion with the Ivy Bridge's launch date, HP starts a second restructuring attempt and Nvidia launches rumors about a Tegra 4 – all (amongst other things) because of Apple.

Until now, things haven't been going well for Intel in the TV market. A new media processor is supposed to help it gain a foothold with settop boxes, and concerning the television business, Intel has further grandiose plans. AMD could minimally increase its market share in the past year, but suffered severe losses in the server sector. The new Opteron 3200 family is supposed to turn the tides.

It is hard to believe, but with the Remote Management Module 4, for the servers with the new Xeon E5 processors, Intel gets rid of a long-standing annoyance. AMD sells its remaining stake in Globalfoundries and might equip the next Sony Playstation.

Intel releases the instruction extension for transactional memory and gives numerous speeches at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). AMD equips the Piledriver with inductors and China delivers another new processor.

Intel's Haswell processor casts its shadow before it, AMD starts an open-standard IP initiative for SoCs, Apple partner Audience Inc is going public and the final end of the Itanium is on the horizon.

In the world of high performance computing, there are three distinct metrics in play: number crunching speed; data crunching speed; and energy efficiency. Can a computer excel at all three, or is our best recourse to try for something less than a hat trick?

The China TOP100 List of High Performance Computer was released by the Specialty Association of Mathematical & Scientific Software (SAMSS), CSIA.