City's supercomputer ranking slips

Hong Kong has slipped down the ranks of markets running the industry's fastest supercomputers, according to the latest survey of the top 500 systems worldwide.

An IBM supercomputer installed last November at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) was the only high-performance system from the city to make the list, released earlier this month by a group of researchers.

That number was down from four last June, when supercomputers at Hutchison Telecom, Baptist University and an undisclosed financial institution in the city were among the world's top-performing systems.

The HKU machine - made up of a cluster of 128 IBM eServer x335 servers, powered by 256 Pentium 4 Xeon processors at 2.8-gigahertz each - was ranked No 308 this year from No 240 last June. It is Hong Kong's fastest supercomputer.

HKU Computer Centre director Nam Ng said the ranking showed the university's efforts in a wide range of research in molecular physics, quantum chemistry and mathematics.

The HKU supercomputer is being used by university engineers in projects that include simulating real-time traffic conditions for congested highways, analysis of tall building structures, three-dimensional analysis of brittle materials to determine potential nuclear waste disposal sites, and testing a nationwide grid computing initiative with mainland universities.

Mr Ng said the decline in the number of Hong Kong supercomputer sites ranked in the top 500 list came at a time when the mainland was increasing its deployment of these high-performance computing systems.