Europe's fastest machines are used for weather forecasting and meteorological application

Almere 28 Nov 99 The European top 10 of fastest supercomputers is dominated by machines that are used for weather forecasting and other meteorological applications. This can be deducted from the November 1999 list of fastest supercomputers in the world. The fastest machine in Europe is the Cray T3E at the "Deutscher Wetterdienst" in Offenbach, Germany. On the second and third place are machines at the UK Meteorological Office in Bracknell. On place eight, the only non T3E machine in the top 10, the Fujitsu VPP5000 at Meteo France in Toulouse can be found. The other machines in the top 10 are located at German and UK research organisations. The number 1 in Europe is more powerful than the numbers 9 & 10 combined.

That the machines in the top 10 indeed are very powerfull, can also be seen when one looks at the machines in the lower regions of the top500. For instance, on place 495 is the machine at UNI-C in Lyngby, Denmark, with a performance of 33.9 Gflop/s. Still an impressive machine, closing the European list. Twenty pages up in the European list, on number 450 world wide, there is a machine at the Bourse in Luxembourg, with 34.4 Gflop/s. The 20 machines that are closing the European list (in the region from 450 to 495 world wide) combined have the same power as the number 1 European machine.

The top 10 machines in Europe in the November 1999 supercomputer list.

	Europe Rank	Rank	Manufacturer	Computer	R_max	Installation Site	Country	Year	Area of Installation	# Proc	R_peak	N_max	N1/2
1	9	Cray/SGI	T3E1200	671.2	Deutscher WetterdienstOffenbach	Germany	1999	Research Weather	812	974.4	.	.
2	11	Cray/SGI	T3E900	552.92	United Kingdom Meteorological OfficeBracknell	UK	1997	Research Weather	876	788.4	.	.
3	13	Cray/SGI	T3E1200	526.6	United Kingdom Meteorological OfficeBracknell	UK	1999	Research Weather	636	763.2	.	.
4	14	Cray/SGI	T3E1200	509.9	CSAR at the University of ManchesterManchester	UK	1998	Academic	612	734.4	.	.
5	20	Cray/SGI	T3E1200	447.8	Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ Juelich)	Germany	1999	Research	540	648	181440	17280
6	25	Cray/SGI	T3E	355.1	Max-Planck-Gesellschaft MPI/IPPGarching	Germany	1997	Research	812	487.2	.	.
7	27	Cray/SGI	T3E900	341.3	HWW/Universitaet StuttgartStuttgart	Germany	1996	Industry	540	486	.	.
8	32	Fujitsu	VPP5000/31	286.9	Meteo-FranceToulouse	France	1999	Research Weather	31	297.6	.	.
9	39	Cray/SGI	T3E900	253.8	ZIB/Konrad Zuse-Zentrum fuer InformationstechnikBerlin	Germany	1999	Academic	404	363.6	.	.
10	42	Cray/SGI	T3E	234.9	Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ Juelich)	Germany	1996	Research	540	324	86400	14400

From the 152 European machines in the top 500, IBM has installed 67 machines. SUN is second with 29 and SGI/Cray third with 27. HP (10), Fujitsu (9), NEC (7) Siemens (1) and Hitachi(1) follow. One machine is "self-made".

In fact, it is thanks to Europe that IBM took over the first position from SGI/Cray. In the USA, SGI/Cray has 50% more machines than IBM: in Japan, six times as much.

I this list, there are only two machines that are made in Europe: the HpcLine cluster in Paderborn and the Parnass cluster in Bonn.

Fore more information, check in at: TOP500 analysis using XML versions of the list and the The TOP500 web site .

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