The USA is rising above the ranks in the world of supercomputing with a total of 116 supercomputers, making it to the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. The number has risen from a total of 109 in November 2019. China is still dominating the list though with a total of 219 supercomputers, making it to the list of top 500 most powerful supercomputers though the number has dropped from 227.
Despite the low numbers, though, the US supercomputers are larger and deliver higher installed performance, thus bringing the overall performance on par with China. The total performance of the list’s supercomputers comes out to be 1.56 exaflops with one exaflop being the equivalent of a billion billion calculations per second.
We have put together a list of the top countries as per their share in the top-500 supercomputers.
The USA has managed to keep the top 2 spots on the list to itself thanks to the Department of Energy’s IBM supercomputer Summit and Sierra that was created by IBM in collaboration with Nvidia and Mellanox. The Summit has a maximum recorded performance (Rmax) of 148,600 teraflops and a theoretical peak performance (Rpeack) of 200,794.9 teraflops. ‘Flops’ stands for floating point operations per second and is a means of measuring the computer’s power. Sierra is also being used by the Department of Energy and has a Rmax of 94,640 teraflops and a Rpeak of 125,712 teraflops. For comparison’s sake; a PlayStation 4 offers 1.84 teraflops.
China enjoys the third position on the list of top 500 most powerful supercomputers with the Sunway TaihuLight that is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. The Sunway TaihuLight has a Rmax of 93,014.6 teraflops and a Rpeak of 125,435.9 teraflops. China also enjoys the fourth position on the list with the Tianhe-2A of the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou. This particular supercomputer has a Rmax of 61,444.5 teraflops and a Rpeak of 100,678.7 teraflops.