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1China, U.S. Retain Tops Spots on Global Supercomputers List
2The Sunway TaihuLight Leads the Way
There’s no stopping the Sunway TaihuLight. The China-housed supercomputer delivers an impressive 93 petaflops per second (quadrillions of calculations per second) of performance. It comes with more than 10.6 million cores inside its Sunway SW26010 chips, more than triple those of the second-place competitor.
3China’s Tianhe-2 Stays Firmly in Second Place
Once the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2 has been in second place for quite some time now. Still, it’s exceedingly fast, at 33.8 petaflops per second. It has more than 3.1 million cores, easily topping every supercomputer aside from the Sunway TaihuLight. It’s spinning away at the National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, China.
4Cray’s Titan Holds Strong at No. 3
5Sequoia Remains IBM’s Most Powerful Computer
6The Cori Cray Moves into Fifth Place
7The Upcoming Oakforest-PACS Powerhouse
The Oakforest-PACS will be fully operational in Japan’s Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing starting Dec. 1. But it’s already made an impression, thanks to its more than 556,000 cores that are delivering 13.6 petaflops per second. It was built by Fujitsu, making it the most powerful supercomputer built by that company.
8Former Champion K Computer Hangs on to Seventh Place
The old stalwart K computer, deemed the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2011, is still hanging on, in seventh place. The Fujitsu-designed supercomputer features SPARC64 processors with more than 705,000 cores. It’s plenty powerful at 10.5 petaflops per second, but soon will be replaced by a new “Post-K” computer that will run on ARM-based processors.
9Switzerland Makes an Appearance with Piz Daint
10IBM’s Blue Gene/Q Mira is Another Former Champion
11Cray Trinity Holds Down 10th Place
Cray holds three of the top 10 spots in the list of most powerful supercomputers. The least-powerful of the triplet is the Trinity, delivering 8.1 petaflops of power across its more than 301,000 cores. It’s in operation at the Los Alamos National Lab.