What are Supercomputers doing at the moment?

As China joins the list of fastest Supercomputers on the 5th place, it is maybe worth to look at what are the main application areas for the top 500 Supercomputers.

It is always difficult to look at details of major projects run by supercomputers, because there is so much they are doing every second. For example the fastest supercomputer in the world, Jaguar, is able to run 1759 petaflops (1 petaflop = quadrillion operations per second) and has 224,162 processors. From their website it seems that astrophysics (supernova collapse), superconductors and fusion plasmas are top priorities, although other disciplines have reasonable share in Jaguar processing time.

It is hard to find out what research the Chinese supercomputer, Tianjin-1, is going to be used for. They indicated that petroleum exploration and the simulation of large aircraft designs would be major areas. Still, it belongs to The Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), so...

Now, what about general patterns of application for other remaining 500 supercomputers? Lets take first 6 major ones. While it is 'not specified' what is the application of 117 of them, 78 is used for research, 47 - finance, 34 - information service, 31 - geophysics, 30 - logistic services, 22 - semiconductors. Not bad. The question is - what kind of research (78)? If geophysics or superconductors are there, together with aerospace, medicine and life sciences, this must be cell biology or advanced physics.

Table 1: Supercomputers application area (source: top500.org)

However, things get complicated when we look at segments of market the computers are working for. The leading is industry - using 62.4% of them (312). This is followed by research - 18.2% (91) and academic segment - 15.8% (79). That would indicate (only by subjective correlation) that the majority of 'research' (from the application area table) is done for industry, and therefore have some commercial application. This might be pretty much everything, from new face-scrub recipe and GM crop to design of super-submarine or space craft. However, deeper inquire reveal that massive calculating power is bought by stock market companies for so called 'high-frequency trading' (HFT). In HFT supercomputers make calculations, predictions and decisions by analyzing ongoing flow of data from stock market and test it against historical data. And it all occurs very, very fast - they can handle 10,000 orders per second. HFT is a topic I will discuss on different occasion, some people contribute credit crunch on this strategy, but certainly we live in strange and beautiful times, your company has miliseconds advantage over the others, and it matters, and it already occurs without human intervention - how could it be differently now?

I guess that nicely summarizes the topic - supercomputers are where the money are. And what the do - well, calculate those money ;-)

Table 2: Countries with highest number of supercomputers and number of supercomputers used in different market segments (source: top500.org)

[data source: www.top500.org]
[photo credit: ORLN]