In the battle for supercomputing supremacy, the US is slowing down — it’s now tied for the global lead

Per the 48th edition of the TOP500 supercomputer ranking, the US now shares the world lead in total number of supercomputers with China.

China has made a serious push over the last year to catch up to the US. At the time the study was published, the two nations claimed 171 systems. They are both approximately equal in raw computing power, too.

Last year, China had 108 supercomputer systems to the United States’ 200. Since then, it has ramped up production efforts — so much so, in fact, the country actually edged out the United States for the first time ever with 167 systems compared to States’ 165 this past June. 

Worth noting: China now holds 33.3% of the total in aggregate Linpack performance, with the US edging the nation with 33.9%.

Making up the rest of the list of top supercomputing countries are Germany with 32 supercomputing systems, Japan (27), France (20), and the United Kingdom (17). 

The top 10 supercomputers in the world remains mostly unchanged from 2015: China’s Sunway TaihuLight is still the world leader with 93 petaflops; the country’s Tianhe-2 remains in second place at 34 petaflops. There were two new additions to the list though: Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s “Cori” supercomputer has the number 5 slot with 14 petaflops, while the Oakforest-PACS at Japan’s Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing now ranks number six with 13.6 petaflops.

The total performance of all 500 computers on the list is 60% higher than a year prior — operating at approximately 672 petaflops. 

The top 10 supercomputers are as follows:

The last bit of information worth sharing from the report is energy efficiency when it comes to these systems. Leading this particular category is NVIDIA’s in-house DGX SATURNV system. It’s a 3.3-petaflop cluster of DGX-1 servers delivering 9.46 gigaflops / watt. The second-most energy-efficient supercomputer is Switzerland’s Piz Daint, which has a rating of 7.45 gigaflops / watt. To put these numbers into perspective, the bare-minimum goal for the first exascale systems is 50 gigaflops / watt. 

To learn more, read the study in full at Top500.org