Russia's launch of Sputnik in 1957 triggered a crisis of confidence in the U.S. that helped drive the creation of a space program. Now, Russia is comparing the U.S.'s achievements in supercomputing with theirs, and they don't like what they see.

HAMBURG, Germany—The 33rd edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is still led by Roadrunner and Jaguar, but shows that two of the top 10 positions are now claimed by new systems in Germany. The latest listing, to be announced Tuesday, June 23, at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference, also includes a brand-new player, an IBM BlueGene/P system at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, ranked at No. 14.

The highlights of the 33rd TOP500 list will be presented during the opening session of ISC'09 in Hamburg, Germany.

If we calculate the performance predictions for the TOP500 list, then we will see a 100 Petaflops system  most likely  in the year 2016. In the past we had a performance increase within 11 years from Gigaflops (Cray2 in 1986), via Teraflops (Intel ASCI Red in 1997) up to the Petaflops ( IBM Roadrunner in 2008 ) by a factor of 1000.

NEC Corporation today announced that the renewed "Earth Simulator System," which NEC deployed for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (President: Yasuhiro Kato, Hereinafter: JAMSTEC), an independent administrative organization, on March 1, 2009, achieved sustained performance of 122.4 TFLOPS (*1, TERAFLOPS) and computing efficiency (*2) of 93.38% on the LINPACK Benchmark (*3).

The first electronic computer was tested in 1942. Since that time, computers have changed a great deal, but my own brain has not changed much. While computers have gotten faster and more powerful, I'm still using the first brain installed in my skull.

The Research Computing Center of Lomonosov Moscow State University and the RAS Joint Supercomputer Center – the creators of Supercomputers.ru web portal - have announced the publication of the 10th edition of the CIS Top 50 most powerful computers rating. For the first time ever the average peak performance of the systems represented in the rating has exceeded 10 TFlop/s.

HAMBURG, Germany – The conference program for the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’09) is now finalized, and according to ISC’09 General Chair Prof. Hans Meuer, this year's conference program is set to be the most illustrious in the 24-year history of the conference. This year’s conference will be held June 23-26 in Hamburg.

Top Supercomputers-India is an effort to list the most powerful supercomputers in India. This effort is complementary to the Top500 project that lists the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

Hans Meuer, Horst Simon, Jack Dongarra and 21 others from the USA and Asia received a special award this year for attending all 21 SC conferences since 1988. The award was given as part of the opening session of SC08 in Austin, TX.

The first SC conference was held in Orlando, FL ( November 14-18, 1988). Hans Meuer is the only European to attend all 21 SC conferences.