The 43rd Top500 List was released Monday June 23rd, during the opening session of the ISC'14 conference in Leipzig, Germany. 

LEIPZIG, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.For the third consecutive time, Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by Chinas National University of Defense Technology, has retained its position as the worlds No. 1 system with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark, according to the 43rd edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the worlds most powerful supercomputers.

The 43rd Top500 List will be released Monday June 23rd, during the opening session of the ISC'14 conference in Leipzig, Germany. ISC is an IEEE-recognized key global conference and exhibition for high performance computing, networking and storage.

"Hans Werner Meuer (1936 2014) and his legacy need little introduction within the high-performance computing (HPC) community. In Europe, he is known as the Father of European supercomputing. Hans, as he was fondly known in the community, became involved in data processing in 1960 and for the next 54 years of his life, he played various roles in the supercomputing world."

Since June of 1993, the Top500 List has been presenting information on the worlds 500 most powerful computer systems. The statistics about these systems have proven to be of substantial interest to computer manufacturers, users and funding authorities. While interest in the list is focused on the computers, less attention is paid to the countries hosting them. Lets take a look at the Top500 List countries. Who are they? How might one characterize them?

Submission deadline for the June release of the TOP500 List which will be released on Monday, June 23rd during thethe International Supercomputing Conference (ISC)isMay 18th(23:59 PST).All system reported have to be installed by June 1st. The last date for submitting linkpack updates is also June 1st. For more details, please take a look at the submission guidelines and the instructions of the submission process.

Although they’ve been rather quiet compared to their competitors in the general server, GPU and of course, overall HPC market, it might be too early to write off AMD just yet. If we’re to look at their silence as the “calm before the storm” consider it typhoon season, at least according Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the AMD server business unit, whom we spoke with this week.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center recently accepted “Edison,” a new flagship supercomputer designed for scientific productivity. Named in honor of American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, the Cray XC30 will be dedicated in a ceremony held at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) on February 5, 2014, and scientists are already reporting results.

Water scarcity has been surfacing as an extremely critical issue worth addressing in the U.S. as well as around the globe nowadays. A McKinsey-led report shows that, by 2030, the global water demand is expected to exceed the supply by 40%. According to another recent report by The Congressional Research Service (CRS), more than 70% of the land area in the U.S. underwent drought condition during August, 2012.

Beyond a pure passion for technology and the thrill of turning ideas into reality, there is a hugely practical basis for investment in advanced computing. Supercomputers and other computational technologies bolster economic competitiveness, a notion that nearly all academic, industry and government leaders have embraced. As supercomputers become more powerful, manufacturers can run bigger and more complex models, saving time and money in the process.