21 June 2016, USA :
For the last three consecutive years, China has topped the Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers with its massive Tianhe-2.
Today, the Top500 group announced that Tianhe-2 has been ousted by another Chinese supercomputer, ‘the Sunway TaihuLight.’ The new machine, which is based at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, can perform a key benchmark test called Linpack at 93 petaflops (a thousand trillion floating point operations per second)—nearly three times the speed of the Tianhe-2.
Titan, a Cray X40 system installed at the us Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is now at the third position, with 17.59 quadrillions of calculations per second.
Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Fujitsu’s K computer installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Japan are at the fourth and fifth positions respectively.
According to the Top500 site, Sunway TaihuLight will be used for research and engineering work, including weather modeling and advanced manufacturing.
“Considering that just 10 years ago, China claimed a mere 28 systems on the list, with none ranked in the top 30, the nation has come further and faster than any other country in the history of supercomputing,” said Top500.
For the first time since the list began, China has overtaken the US with 167 computers in the top 500 while the US has 165.
Image- bbc.com
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