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It'due south that time of the twelvemonth again: TOP500 published its twice-annual list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world today, and it looks like China'due south Tianhe-2 is still on elevation — and for the sixth consecutive time. There are two new systems in the tiptop 10: At number half-dozen is Cray's Trinity, jointly developed by the Section of Energy's Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, and at number eight is Hazel-Hen, also built by Cray and residing at the HLRS – Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum Stuttgart in Germany.

More than telling is what constitutes the remainder of the group. The U.S. has the lowest number of systems in the peak 500 since the latter was offset created in 1993, while Cathay now has nigh three times as many systems on the listing every bit information technology did before. Six of the summit 10 systems were installed in 2022 or 2022, the written report said, while Tianhe-ii fired up in 2022.

So, onto the results: Tianhe-two sits on pinnacle of the Linpack criterion with 33.86 petaflops/s (or quadrillions of calculations per second, or Pflop/s). Side by side upwardly is the Cray XK7 system Titan (pictured beneath), located at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S., with 17.59 Pflop/due south on the Linpack criterion.

titan supercomputer

Trinity, the Cray XC system landing at number 6, scored viii.i Pflop/southward with its 301,056 cores, while the 185,088-core Hazel-Han in Frg scored five.6 Pflop/s. Cray is on a bit of a tear lately, after having previously fallen from favor; it now has 24.nine percentage of installed full performance beyond the TOP500, up from 24 percent, and is the leading vendor in this benchmark overall. IBM is in second identify with 14.9 percentage, downwardly from 23 (see below as to why), while HP is at 3rd with 12.nine pct (down from xiv.2).

Breaking down the list farther, the U.S. now contains only 200 of the 500 systems, downwardly from 231 in July and as mentioned the lowest since the list was first created 22 years ago. Next up is now Prc, leapfrogging all of Europe with 109 systems; the latter now has just 108 in total, down from 141. Red china tin can count function of its success to a rebranding of machines from IBM to either IBM/Lenovo or Lenovo/IBM, while the Chinese vendor Sugon has a total of 49 systems in the list.

Another key change: The growth rate is lagging, with a new normal of a 55 percent comeback in performance year-over-year for the past half dozen years, compared with xc percent yr-over-twelvemonth jumps before that fourth dimension. Lxxx of the 500 systems are faster than 1 Pflop/s. Within the acme 10, Tianhe-2 (#1) and Stampede (#x) use Intel Xeon Phi processors, while Titan (#2) and Piz Daint (#seven) use Nvidia GPUs to improve computational speeds.

Hither's the current list:

1. Tianhe-2: TH-IVB-FEP Cluster; National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, China; 3.12 million cores (33.86 petaflop/s).

two. Titan: A Cray XK7 system at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (17.59 petaflop/south).

iii. Sequoia: An IBM BlueGene/Q system located at the Department of Free energy's Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, with 1.57 one thousand thousand cores.

4. 1000 Calculator: A SPARC64 system with 705k cores at RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan.

5. Mira: IBM BlueGene/Q; DOE/SC/Argonne National Laboratory, The states; 786k custom IBM cores.

6.Trinity:Cray XC40; DOE/NNSA/LANL/SNL, U.s.a.; 301,056 Xeon E5-2698v3 cores.

7. Piz Daint: Cray XC30 with 116k Xeon and Nvidia cores; located at the Swiss National Computing Middle in Switzerland.

8. Hazel Hen: Cray XC40; HRLS-Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum Stuttgart, Deutschland; 185k Xeon E5-2680v3 cores.

9. Shaheen Two: A Cray XC40 at King Abdullah's University of Science and Technology in Kingdom of saudi arabia, marking the first appearance of a Middle East supercomputer in the height 10 (5.536 petaflop/due south).

10. Stampede: A Dell PowerEdge C8220 system with 462k Xeon Phi cores at the Texas Advanced Calculating Center/Academy of Texas in the U.s..

The adjacent step is whether anyone tin figure out how to build a real quantum computer. IBM has previously said that if someone tin can build one with just l quantum $.25 (qubits), and that can detect both types of errors and scale to large systems, no combination of today's TOP500 supercomputers could successfully outperform it."

Suddenly the Devil'south Canyon Core i7 PC on my desk is looking a chip slow these days.