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Earth Simulator by NEC still world's fastest computer

The twice-annual ranking of the world's fastest computers, announced Friday at a supercomputer industry conference in Baltimore, included two new entrants based on personal computers, including one cluster of machines running the Linux operating system.

The Top500 List, released by computer scientists based at the University of Tennessee and the University of Mannheim in Germany, was dominated by the Earth Simulator, made by the NEC Corp of Japan.

The Japanese machine shook up the computing world when its performance results were announced in April by Jack Dongarra, one of the computer scientists who, since 1993, have been tracking the speed of the world's fastest machines.

American scientists see the powerful Earth Simulator as evidence that the US has been spending disproportionately on computers that are primarily aimed at weapons research. Before the Japanese accomplishment this spring, the US had dominated the top computing spot for many years.

Despite the new Japanese dominance, seven of the world's fastest computers are installed in the US. France and Britain also have machines that are among the top 10.

In the new ranking, the ASCI Q supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico occupies the No. 2 and 3 positions, because of its segmented design. Additionally, two supercomputers based on IBM's Power4processor have joined the list.
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