Ireland falls down European ranking in November 2014 List.
The statistics on this page compare the top research supercomputer in every country in the European Economic Area (EEA). The specs from each machine are taken from www.top500.org. In particular we compare Ireland to other EEA countries. This is the second edition of the list statistics – the first list compared Ireland against other EEA using the June 2014 top500 list.
Since the previous list (June 2014) Ireland has fallen out of the Top 500 list again (our time there was short lived – only 12 months), almost all of the other countries’ machines have also increased in speed and performance meaning that Ireland has fallen relatively sharply in comparison.
The following two bar charts show Ireland in relation to other Top500 EEA countries as of the most recent list. In each graph we take the largest research supercomputer in each country. While Ireland ranks near the bottom in terms of Cores (new country Hungary’s top machine has less cores) and ranks the lowest in terms of List Position this should not be surprising given Ireland’s size (I actually cheated a little here – Fionn has no actual rank as such now given it has fallen out of the top 500 so I just assigned it a list position of 501).
The Top500 list position of the largest research supercomputer in each country in the EEA. Ireland has fallen out of the top 500 in the most recent listing and so I gave it the nominal entry point of 501.
The Number of Cores in the largest research computer in each EEA country represented on the Top500 list. Ireland has the second lowest amount of cores of all EEA countries in the Top500 list.
However, direct comparisons between Ireland and other EEA countries are somewhat unfair given we are one of the smallest countries. Weighting the statistics by population size is probably a fairer measure as the following charts show.
The RPeak per Capita of the largest research computer in each EEA country on the Top500 list. Rpeak is the maximum number of floating point operations achieved by the supercomputer using the Linpack benchmark.
The RMax per Capita value of the largest research supercomputer in each EEA country represented on the Top500 list. Rmax is the theoretical maximum speed of the machine.
The Number of Cores in the largest research supercomputer in each country represented in the Top500 weighted by the country’s population.
So while Ireland has certainly fallen backwards in the six months since the first 2014 list it is still performing relatively well. Finland, which has a similar population to Ireland, was the biggest mover and now lies in second place behind the Swiss juggernaut which has more that 100,000 cores! It should be noted as well that other similarly sized EEA countries like Finland tend to have several machines in the top500 while Ireland currently has none.
Ireland is a strong country in terms of ICT in general but we’re falling behind in terms of world class supercomputing facilities and it’s likely that it’s our researchers who are suffering.
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