Supercomputing

The Americans have long fallen behind in the race of speedy computers -- behind the Japanese -- and now they've standing up and taking notice. There's national pride behind the American push to beat the Japanese -- national pride and pure economics. Supercomputers bring the research time down from years to mere hours. The American's have been losing the race mainly because they're targeting business users for their supercomputers -- business users who require general purpose machines that can attack differing problems and do so in a cost effective way. They've therefore been manufacturing beasts that exploit cluster technologies. These machines use off the shelf CPU and components, and allow developers to code problems using everyday delvelopment tools. The Japanese on the other hand, have been creating specialized CPUs that are made to tackle specific types of problems, and therefore need specialized code to be written -- read more expensive. Which approach is better? There is no right answer -- but the clustering approach ain't that bad. Check out the top supercomputers of the world to see who's currently on top.