China's world-beating Tianhe-2 super has brawn, not brains

It's all about the software. It doesn't matter if it's a mobile phone, desktop, server, mainframe or supercomputer, the software is always King.

The Japanese K machine, 4th on the list, is the highest placed pure CPU computer. I know it uses a bespoke interconnect but there's probably a ton of software for it, or at least lots of source code that can be easily adapted. That might make it the 'quickest' computer out there because no one is wasting time writing software...

Anybody who has bought a Chinese tablet/phone etc. knows this isn't unusual... I have cupboards full of old things like tablets etc. that have so much potential but can't be used because the software is rubbish and the manufacturer won't open-source kernel code.

"Too many researchers, the report says, have to write their own software to use the machine"

Sounds like the Chinese dont really "get" computational science then. When I last worked in that field, researchers writing their own software for high-performance computing platforms was pretty much what it was all about.