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Top500: Switzerland Worldwide Third for Flops / Inhabitants

The 34th TOP500 List has been released November 17th in Portland, Oregon at the SC09 Conference. Switzerland has been able to improve its general placement in the list of the most powerful supercomputer worldwide.

For the first time since ever Swizerland has been able to place five system in the list with the following LINPACK performance peak:

  • Swiss Scientific Computing Center (CSCS)  168,7 TFlops
  • ETH Zuerich    51,8 TFlops
  • University of Zuerich    49,5 TFlops
  • Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne    47,7 TFlops
  • Geophysics Company    28,9 TFlops

for a total of 346,8 TFlops. Compared to the number of inhabitants this places at the third position worldwide and as the first in Europe (numbers are Gigaflops pro inhabitant):

  • New Zealand    54
  • United States    53
  • Switzerland    44
  • Sweden    32
  • Germany    27
  • Austria    26
  • United Kingdom    25
  • Finland     19
  • France     18

The good placement of Switzerland is a first result of the additional awareness for HPC and the first results of the implementation of the national HPC strategy (HPCN). Even if the placement is very good we have not to forget that Switzerland has one of the highest density of researchers worldwide at that the country is higly depending on the results of research for its prosperity.