Slashdot reports on an Indian Supercomputer capable of 1 TFLOP, and allegedly scalable to 16 TFLOP. As of November 2002, the fastest super computer known to the public was clocked at ~35-40 TFLOP (!), with the rest of the top five super computers operating in the ~5-10 TFLOP range.
A few years ago (1999?), the top 500 list made news because the first two Beowulf clusters made it into the list of fastest computers (#335 or so IIRC). My, how the times have changed. Four of the top five supercomputers listed are still at US research labs (2 at LLNL and 2 at LANL). (The fastest machine listed is that 35 TFLOP monster in Japan.) HP has four of the top 10 slots, followed by IBM at 3, with the remaining three slots going to NEC (#1), Linux NetworX (#5) (!), and HPTi (#8).
If I'm reading that correctly, at least one of the top five and two of the top ten supercomputers listed in the top 500 are Linux/Beowulf clusters. Additionally, Dell's fastest entry (#22, ~2 TFLOP) is a cluster of Intel boxes that is faster than the fastest entries by old-school supercomputing powerhouses Hitachi (#26, ~1.7 TFLOP), SGI (#28, ~1.6 TFLOP) and Cray (#39, ~1.1 TFLOP).
Other interesting factoids are the number of "self-made" entries (15, starting at #48, about 1 TFLOP) and the number of small companies like Linux NetworX that are found on the list.
