I worked with PRACE over the summer and got a good look into the world of academic supercomputing. Let me just say, it's a lot of nonsense. There's an academic clique of mechanical engineers "optimising" algorithms by parralelising them, eating up core hours, and publishing papers on their "optimised algorithms". The problem? These algorithms they're optimising are embarrassingly parallel. The site I worked at had a team that published a paper with 4 co-authors on parallelization of the k-means algorithm, they literally just wrote a few lines of CUDA, OpenMP and MPI, and published a fucking paper on it. This little academic clique just keep citing each others papers in their own little bubble, boosting their citation metrics so they look like good researchers on paper, thus keeping their massive tax-paid salaries for repeating work that some CS undergrads do in their spare time. Proper computer science journals wouldn't accept the crap these guys come out with. But with these low quality HPC papers, it's mostly mechanical engineers and physicists muscling their way into CS so they can get that sweet sweet ICT funding.

But honestly, the whole ranking thing is childish, when you get supercomputer access from one of these academic clusters, you get a core hour budget on a shared system being used by hundreds. There's no real benefit in having one massive supercomputer instead of 2-3 moderately sized clusters.

As with everything in academia, think critically about what these guys are saying and why they're saying it. He says Ireland is lagging behind because he wants more funding for his little projects, nothing new.