<p>For what it is worth, here is the list of the universities with the fastest US supercomputers. Numbers indicate the rank among the top 500 fastest in the world. Naturally, there are different measures of speed.
I don't pretend that this ranking corresponds to a ranking of the best research programs in CS. But it is interesting.</p>
<p>4 U Texas
22 RPI
23 UIUC
38 U Texas
57 U Tenn
60 Harvard
62 Clemson
63 USC
67 UNC
77 Caltech
79 Indiana University
80 University of Nebraska Omaha
124 University of Minnesota
126 USC
129 CMU/University of Pittsburgh
133 Colorado School of Mines
134 UIUC
164 Stanford
217 UCSD
237 University of Arizona
263 University of Kentucky
273 BYU
280 Virginia Tech
283 Arizona State University
339 University of Arkansas
340 Stanford
344 Louisiana State
390 UIUC
411 Harvard
473 UCSD</p>
<p>These are only US academic supercomputers, so the missing numbered ones are either in other countries and/or belong to governments, corporations, etc (in other words, non-academic). Note a college may have more than one supercomputer. MIT doesn't appear to have one in the world's top 500 unless it is listed as owned by Lincoln Labs or something. Similarly with UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>Do CS departments even use supercomputers much? I had always figured it would be the physical sciences taking up that computer time. Stuff like geologists running giant finite element models or stuff like that.</p>
<p>Also, just to note, one of my friends here does computation materials science work, and he just runs all of his programs remotely through a supercomputer at one of the national labs.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Stuff like geologists running giant finite element models or stuff like that.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I know that my former mechanics prof used to enjoy monopolizing the UIUC supercomputer to do finite element modeling of SRBs' and their fuel loads as they were firing. It's a wonderfully hairy problem... You've got thermal expansion of everything, the stresses on the SRBs as the fuel and the metal they're made of expands, the dissipation of the fuel as it's burned, the thrust of the rockets, all sorts of things... The sorts of things that make mechanics professors giggle with glee. Me too, actually.</p>
<p>If Aero weren't in El Segundo... <em>sigh</em>. I just don't like Los Angeles.</p>
<p>CS/CE people design the supper computers but the engineering and physics groups actually use them. I've done both development of these things and using them for physical simulations.</p>
<p>YES! The force field generated by the minds of the students and profs during lectures would cause an egg to fry. Supercomputer? Try last years graduating CS class.</p>