Cray Reinvents Itself Again and Will Build a Second DOE Exascale System

At SC17 in Denver, the Japanese RIKEN K computer emerged for the third straight time as the world's most powerful supercomputer based on the High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark list. Although China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer has been widely seen as number one in the world based on its LINPAC rating, the HPCG test that the K computer excelled on may be more representative of the range of real-world HPC problems encounter by users. Riken's K computer has been either number one or two since the HPCG list came out in 2014.

First quarter 2018 HPC server revenues were strong, with notable high quarter over quarter growth from the first quarter of last year. Hyperion Research has been analyzing the data to ascertain what these numbers mean and what they may indicate about full-year 2018 in HPC. These assessments incorporate Hyperion Research discussions with a global base of people in the HPC sector as well as an analysis of the Hyperion Research QView database, a long-standing collection of quarterly revenues and projections for the major HPC vendors.