Top500 has released its 54th edition of the list comprising of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, and all the supercomputers in the list have one thing in common – Linux.
The average speed of the supercomputers featured in the list is now 1.65 exaflops, and the entry-level supercomputer now performs at 1.14 petaflops as compared to 1.02 petaflops when the list was released back in June 2019.
World’s Fastest Supercomputer Can Perform 1 Quadrillion Operations Per Second
The top position on the list remains unchanged, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit System remains the world’s fastest supercomputer with an astonishing speed of 148.6 petaflops. To give you an idea, one petaflop computer system can perform one quadrillion or 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second. It is a Linux powered supercomputer built by IBM and uses Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
The second position in the list is bagged by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sierra System that also runs on the same chips but delivers the performance of 94.6 petaflops.
At number 3 is Sunway TaihuLight Supercomputer developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology. The supercomputer is powered by Sunway’s SW26010 processors and exhibits the HPL mark of 93.0 petaflops.
A new supercomputer that emerged in this edition is AiMOS, which is developed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Computational Innovations (CCI). It appears in the 25th position and delivers the speed of 8.0 petaflops.
Apart from the fact that all the 500 supercomputers appearing in this list run on Linux, the list also shows that China has emerged as a dominating country developing supercomputers. As many as 227 supercomputers out of 500 are China-developed. There are only 118 US-based supercomputers on the list.
However, the supercomputers developed by the US are larger and faster. If we consider the average performance of the supercomputers in the list, the US stands at 37.8%, and China trails it with a 31.9% share.
You can read the entire list here.
