US Supercomputer Lead Sparks Russian Govt's Competitive Drive

CWmike writes "Russia's launch of Sputnik in 1957 triggered a crisis of confidence in the US that helped drive the creation of a space program. Now, Russia is comparing the US's achievements in supercomputing with theirs, and they don't like what they see. In a speech on Tuesday, Russia's President, Dmitry Medvedev, criticized his country's IT industry almost to the point of sarcasm for failing to develop supercomputing technology, and urged a dramatic change in Russia's use of high-performance computing. Medvedev, at the opening address of a Security Council Meeting on Supercomputers in Moscow, told attendees that 476 out of the 500 supercomputers on the Top500 list were manufactured in the United States. 'Therefore, in general, our situation is very difficult,' he said."

Comments

Re:Supercomps vs Botnets

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Russia was focusing on botnets. Most of these have a lot more processing power than the fastest supercomputers.

The expensive part of supercomputing is not the processors, it's having enough throughput on the backend to feed those CPUs.