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If you look at the statistics over time here for accelerators:

https://www.top500.org/statistics/overtime/

it appears the number of top500 systems with accelerators is not really increasing much - it has been sitting at around 20% of the top 500 machines for the past ~4 years.

Can anyone working with these systems comment on why that might be? Are accelerators still tough to apply to a lot of the problems these machines are used for?

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Depends on what the computer is designed for. Imagine you want to parallelize up to about 16 nodes or 1000-2000 cores of a new xeon. And your code is not optimized for accelerators. Well you might build a large machine with hundreds of nodes, but with the intent to run many 16 node jobs at a time. The largest machines though mostly are aiming for jobs that use a significant fraction of the total machine and are chasing peak performance so accelerators it is. Also I didn't look too closely at the link, but some machines that aren't technically accelerators like K computer or the old IBM Bluegene computers are closer to general purpose accelerators than they are to fat xeon nodes.

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