For the last few years, China has been outshining the U.S. by consistently ranking first in TOP500"s supercomputing rankings list, most notably with its TaihuLight. Now the country has seized another victory from the U.S. by having the largest number of supercomputers in the TOP500 ranking - on the other hand, the U.S.’ presence is the lowest that it has been since the list got started 25 years ago.
Until six months ago, the U.S. led with 169 systems to China’s 160; the number of listings by U.S. has now dropped to 143, putting it in second place. China has taken over the U.S. in terms of aggregate performance too, now accounting for 35.4 percent of TOP500 flops, with the U.S. in second place accounting for 29.6 percent.
The November report from TOP500 definitely is not a good one for the U.S., while the top 10 list looks similar to June, the Japanese and Americans have traded places for the number four and five spots respectively. Japan’s Gyoukou supercomputer scored a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 19.14 petaflops, meanwhile the U.S.’ Cray XK7 ranked fifth scoring 17.59.
Next year should be a good year in supercomputing with both Japan and China planning to deploy new machines. China even hopes to have a computer capable of exascale computing, something the U.S. doesn’t expect to have until 2021.
Source: TOP500