On Sunday, TOP500 pushed out the November 2018 top 10 supercomputer list. There were entrants from the U.S., China, Switzerland, Japan, and Germany but the list was topped by the U.S. and it managed to secure five of the ten places in the list.
Coming in first and second place were IBM’s Summit and Sierra supercomputers on behalf of the U.S., Summit increased its High Performance Linpack (HPL) score from 122.3 to 143.5 petaflops since its June debut while Sierra went from 71.6 to 94.6 petaflops. The U.S. holds onto the lead that it snatched away from China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which has remained stagnant in performance as the country develops a new exascale supercomputer which is in the prototype phase.
While China didn’t have a stellar year in terms of its top 10 performance, the country did put up the largest number of supercomputers in the top 500. China now claims 227 systems, or 45%, while the United States’ number of supercomputers is in decline reaching a new low of 109, or 22%. With that said, the U.S.’ supercomputers are more powerful and on average have an aggregate system performance of 38% compared to China’s 31%.
In total, 429 supercomputers managed to score more than one petaflop on the Linpack benchmark, this is up from 272 in June. The entry point in the top 500 list was 874.8 teraflops, while those in the top 100 scored at least 1.97 petaflops. The aggregate performance has also jumped from 1.21 exaflops in June to 1.42 exaflops this time around.