As someone who works in this area, I have some points:
More often than not, things like this are dictated by need and budget more than vanity. Sure, if it looks like a cluster might be close, a customer might press a vendor for a few more compute nodes to push them over the edge, but even that’s fairly rare. For the customer, being in the list at all is decent marketing fodder. For the vendor, having the top spot is cool, but having more systems on the list than your competitors could be argued as at least equally as cool.
This list covers systems that are publicly known about. It’s long been known that institutions like the US NSA have some impressive computing power whose specs are classified. They aren’t alone. Plenty of similar installations around the world, and not just in government. Financial companies, for example, can be quite secretive about their resources.
I'd be curious to see what the score would be by combining some of the AI training clusters that have been assembled - US, Japan and China all have fucking ridiculous clusters, but they're fragmented for different tasks. Combined each country could blow this record out of the water...
As I understand it LineShine is a for-purpose combination of an absolute fuckton of basically COTS cloud computing servers, and can be partitioned into multiple virtual clusters fairly easily. Very neat piece of tech!
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China now has the fastest supercomputer in the world, snatching the top spot from the US for the first time since 2017 | Spyke
As someone who works in this area, I have some points:
I'd be curious to see what the score would be by combining some of the AI training clusters that have been assembled - US, Japan and China all have fucking ridiculous clusters, but they're fragmented for different tasks. Combined each country could blow this record out of the water...
As I understand it LineShine is a for-purpose combination of an absolute fuckton of basically COTS cloud computing servers, and can be partitioned into multiple virtual clusters fairly easily. Very neat piece of tech!