China continues to dominate a list of the world’s fastest supercomputers by the number of systems, according to a semi-annual ranking of the Top500 and reported by China Daily.
China tops the supercomputer list with 219 systems, or 43.8 percent of the total, followed by the United States with 116, and Japan ranks third with 29 systems, followed by France, Britain and Germany, the report said.
Major Chinese supercomputer vendors all improved their shares from six months ago. Lenovo claims the greatest number of systems on the list with 173, followed by Inspur with 71, and Sugon with 63.
The top of the list remained largely unchanged. Two US-built supercomputers Summit and Sierra retain the first two positions, both powered by IBM Power 9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs.
A petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second. The Summit delivered a record of 148.6 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) test, while the Sierra system remains unchanged at 94.6 petaflops.
China’s Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, holds the third position with 93.0 petaflops, the report said. China’s Tianhe-2A, deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, remains number four on the list, achieving an HPL result of 61.4 petaflops.
Frontera, a U.S. system installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas, is fifth-ranked and also the only newcomer in the top 10, while Swiss National Supercomputing Centre’s Piz Daint — Europe’s most powerful supercomputer — wast sixth with 21.2 petaflops, followed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories’ Trinity in seventh at 20.2 petaflops.
Japan’s AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure supercomputer was eighth on the list with 19.9 petaflops, and in ninth spot was SuperMUC-NG with 19.5 petaflops. IBM’s Lassen at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the tenth spot with 18.2 petaflops.
According to Venture Beat, faster (and potentially more power-efficient) machines are on the way, if all goes as projected. In May, AMD announced that its Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge will achieve up to 1.5 exaflops, making it the world’s fastest.