Who Reports On The Other 97 Per Cent?

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The BBC has posted a nice graphic of the latest Top 500 list of supercomputers around the world. It's pretty impressive, particularly if you're a Linux fan (check out the display by operating system). However, nobody would think that a list of the world's 500 richest people told them much about the state of the economy; I'd be much more interested in statistics on how much computing power is employed by the 97% or so of scientists who don't use a supercomputer.