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PRESS RELEASE

June 23, 2017

Dublin, Ireland – The Eighth Irish SUPERCOMPUTER list, ranking the fastest high performance computers in Ireland was released today.

The 8th Irish Supercomputer List was released today featuring two new Top-500 class machines. The new entrants from an undisclosed software company feature at spots 196 and 197 on the 49th Top500 Supercomputer List, each with a Linpack Rmax of 819.16 TFlop/s. This more than doubles the Irish HPC capacity, which is up from 1.46 PFlop/s in November 2016, to 3.01 Pflop/s. These are the 2nd and 3rd highest Irish Top500 rankings of all time. Ireland has ranked on the Top500 list 29 times over a history of 23 years with a total of 18 machines. Over half of these machines (11) and rankings (18) have been in the last 6 years, representing Ireland’s increasing pace of HPC investment.

Irish Supercomputer List maintainer Dr. Brett Becker of the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin said:

The continued growth of the Irish Supercomputer List reflects an exciting period of high performance computing expansion. With emerging technologies in Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning driving the proliferation of high performance computing globally, it is important that Ireland continues to invest in high performance computing. This demands investment in hardware, and most importantly people, across all sectors including academia, industry and government. Throughout its 23 year history of placing machines on the global Top500 supercomputer list, over half of Irelands activity has taken place in the last 6 years. Participation at this level is extremely important in order to remain globally competitive in todays emerging technologies that promise to drive the future economy and to improve the quality of peoples lives.

The Irish Supercomputer List is maintained by an independent group of computer science researchers including members at University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Maynooth University, Dublin City University, and Queen’s University Belfast, with industry representatives from Ireland, the UK and the USA.

The Irish Supercomputer List was launched in November 2013 to raise the profile of High Performance Computing (HPC) in Ireland and abroad. The list is updated twice annually (typically June and November) and there is a continuous open call for participation from users and maintainers of Irish HPC installations.

The June 2017 Irish Supercomputer List is available at www.IrishSupercomputerList.org.

ENDS