US Overtakes China in Top Supercomputer List (bbc.com)

China has been pushed into third place on a list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. From a report: The latest list by Top 500, published twice a year, puts two US machines -- Summit and Sierra -- in the top two places. The US has five entries in the top 10, with other entries from Switzerland, Germany and Japan. However, overall China has 227 machines in the top 500, while the US has 109. Summit can process 200,000 trillion calculations per second. Both Summit and Sierra were built by the tech giant IBM. China's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which this time last year was the world's most powerful machine, is now ranked at number three, while the country also has the fourth spot in the list.

Comments

Re:*sigh* Its still _clusters_!

[DickBreath]

Idea:
1. Take two clusters.
2. Rename them such that they are now a single "super computer".
3. Be the winnars on the Top500 list!
4. Profit!

That business model should be patented!

How you use it?

[Drethon]

The first thing through my head was, does it matter how fast it is if you don't know how to use it, the second was that comes with terrible innuendo...

Regardless, what are really being done with the computers of value? Is the fastest supercomputer really adding the most value to the world?

Of the supercomputers we know of

[Dan East]

We're talking about the list of *known* supercomputers. I'm sure various government agencies have supercomputers that are secret. In fact, it's highly probable that the most powerful in the world are not public knowledge.

Re:Whatta?

[jellomizer]

Super computing isn't like it use to be. (not to discredit all the hard work to the designers of these new computers, as my statement is oversimplifying things) To be on Top for Supercomputer Today it is more of an issue of being able to put more money into the problem then putting more creativity into it.

The old cray systems for example, when they were #1 on the super computing place, was very creative on how they achieved max performance on a relativity small form factor. Today's supercomputers are in essence just a bunch of server blades, with high speed network crammed in as big of a room that you can afford to hold and cool.