Originally Posted by Wren
But that is the point Dude. They are putting the money in. The Arabs and the Chinese are putting all kinds of money into their R&D and their schools are getting into the top 20 in the world and pushing some American ones out.
The supercomputers in the top 500 list are ranked by their speed in solving dense linear equations in the LINPACK benchmark. Companies like Google and Amazon have created huge in-house data centers to meet their actual needs (and to rent computing power to customers), and this arguably a better use of engineering talent than competing on LINPACK.