World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer Is Located in China

Top500 is a list created by researchers from all over the world and includes the most powerful supercomputers in existence. The list is updated twice a year and was published for the first time in June 1993 in order to track the growing power of supercomputers as well as their locations. The benchmarking tool used for measuring this power is named Linpack, and it was developed all the way back in 1979.

Currently, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is China’s Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2). It boasts a mind-boggling performance rating of 33.86 petaflops per second, which means that it can make quadrillions of calculations per second. The second spot on the list is occupied by Titan – a very powerful system used by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ride National Laboratory. By comparison, Titan features a rating of 17.59 petaflops per second. The most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East, Shaheen II, also made the list at no. 7. It is located within the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and performs at 5.536 petaflops per second.

Even though supercomputers used to grow in power at an accelerated rate in the past, the latest readings show a “historically low” growth in their performance. Consequently, the systems that used to be the most impressive a few years ago are still at the top of the Top500 list, and the first 10 spots received only a single new system. Top500 researchers stated the following:

“With few new systems at the top of the past few lists, the overall growth rate is now slowing. This offers an indication that the market for the very largest systems might currently behave differently from the market of mid-sized and smaller supercomputers [which are seeing faster growth rates].”

Thank you Cnet for providing us with this information.