In the early years of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), when the event was topping out at 150 attendees, the beginning of each session commenced with Dr. Hans Meuer ringing a Salvation Army bell that was meant to bring us all together. The memory is a sweet one, but it is with great sadness that Ive learned after a battle with cancer, my friend and colleague has left his community behind.

We sadly announce that the TOP500 Co-Founder and ISC General Chair, Prof. Dr. Hans Werner Meuer passed away at the age of 77 at his home in Daisbach, Southern Germany, on January 20, 2014, after a brief battle with cancer.

The slides of the 42nd TOP500 list are now available. The 42nd TOP500 list was announced during the SC13 conference in Denver, CO.

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, retained its position as the world’s No. 1 system with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark, according to the 42nd edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The list was announced Nov. 18 at the SC13 conference in Denver, Colo.

Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee will receive the ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for his leadership in designing and promoting standards for mathematical software used to solve numerical problems common to high performance computing (HPC). His work has led to the development of major software libraries of algorithms and methods that boost performance and portability in HPC environments, which rely on supercomputers and parallel processing techniques for solving complex computational problems. Dongarra, the Distinguished University Professor at the University of Tennessee, is the founder and director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University, and holds positions …

The TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers first debuted more than two decades ago, in June 1993, the brainchild of Berkeley Lab scientist Erich Strohmaier and Professor Hans Meuer. The much-celebrated list is compiled using the Linpack benchmark, which was developed by Jack Dongarra. Although the continued relevance of the Linpack benchmark as a sole measure of big iron performance has been called into question, the impact of this twice-yearly list as a widely recognized metric and a valuable historical record cannot be denied.

We are now accepting new entries for the next TOP500 list which will be published during the SC conference in Denver, CO on November 17th, 2013.

Berkeley Lab scientist Erich Strohmaier created the first TOP500 list of supercomputers in June 1993 with Professor Hans Meuer. Updated twice annually, the list serves as the industry inventory of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Currently, Dr. Strohmaier is the head of the Future Technologies Group at Berkeley Lab, where his team studies the design and development of hardware and software systems that allow application scientists to more effectively use high-end machines. In this “10 Questions,” Dr. Strohmaier discusses the evolution of the TOP500 list, his own career and where the field of high performance computing is going next.

In this age of big data, would it surprise you to learn that supercomputers are on track to predicting wars, revolutions and other societal disruptions? Data scientist Kalev Leetaru is one of the foremost proponents in the emerging field of predictive supercomputing. His research helped usher in the era of "petascale humanities," where computers can identify useful or interesting patterns if provided with sufficiently large data repositories.

You've undoubtedly heard over and over again about what an absurdly complex entity the human brain is. But a new breakthrough by Japanese and German scientists might finally drive the point home. Taking advantage of the almost 83,000 processors of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, the team was able to mimic just one percent of one second's worth of human brain activityand even that took 40 minutes.