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China rules Top 500 Supercomputer List

by on14 November 2017


America not going to be great again anytime soon

China appears to have made the semi-annual Top 500 Supercomputer List its kingdom. Not only does it top the list but also has 202 ranked systems on the list.

China now claims 202 systems within the Top 500, while the United States is second with 143 systems represented on the list.

Only a few months ago, the US had 169 systems in the Top 500 compared to China's 160. In fact, the drop is so severe that the US Department of Energy is to dole out $258 million in grants to several tech companies to develop exascale systems, the next great leap in HPC.

These systems can handle a billion calculations a second, or one exaflop.

The Top 500 List hasn't changed much since the first 2017 version was released in June.

The Sunway TaihuLight, an HPC system developed by China's National Research Centre for Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC), retains its number one ranking with a performance of 93 petaflops.

The second most powerful system is also located in China. The Tianhe-2, which is based at the National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzho, has the capacity of 33.9 petaflops.

Third place belongs to the Piz Daint in Switzerland, which is a Cray XC50 system that used Nvidia's Tesla P100 graphic processing unit (GPU) chips. It has a capacity of 9.6 petaflops. The fourth most powerful supercomputer is Japan's Gyoukou system, which is deployed at Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology - home of the Earth Simulator. Gyoukou clocks in at 19.14 petaflops.

The US is in fifth place with its Titan, a Cray supercomputer located at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The system fell from fourth to fifth place in the new rankings with a performance of 17.59 petaflops.

Despite its overall drop, the US still has three other systems listed within the top ten, including two more built by Cray and one designed by IBM. Japan also has two additional systems within the top ten. Overall, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has installed the most systems on the Top 500 List, with 122 supercomputers and HPC systems attached to the company.

Last modified on 14 November 2017
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