Published in News

China holds supercomputer crown

by on18 November 2014

US just not quick enough

The Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China's National University of Defence Technology, was named the world' top supercomputer for the fourth time.

According to the TOP500 project the Tianhe-2 kept the US-developed Titan to second spot with a performance of 33.86 petaflop (quadrillions of calculations per second) in a standardised test. IBM's Sequoia rounded out the top 3 in the TOP500 list.

The TOP500 project, started in 1993, issues a list twice a year that ranks supercomputers based on their performance. There has been little change in the top 10 in the latest list and the only new entry was at number 10 – the Cray CS-Storm, developed by Cray, which also developed the Titan.

The US still dominates the league table. It was home to six of the top 10 supercomputers, while China, Japan, Switzerland and Germany had one entrant each. It is also the top country in terms of overall systems with 231. But this figure hides a slide in June the number was 233 and this is getting close to the US’s historical low.

Although it would appear that China is ruling the roost, Chinese systems on the list also dropped to 61 from 76 in June, while Japan increased its number of systems from 30 to 32.

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