AsianScientist (Nov. 15, 2017) – China has edged out the United States as the leading country on the TOP500 ranking in terms of the number of systems and aggregate performance. These results were announced at SC17, an annual supercomputing conference held in Denver, Colarado.
In addition to retaining their top two spots with the Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 systems installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi and National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou respectively, China has increased its number of systems on the TOP500 list from 160 in June 2017 to 202 in the latest ranking. Accordingly, China now accounts for 35.4 percent of all supercomputing power on the list, compared to the US’s 29.6 percent.
The US, which had 169 systems in the June 2017 ranking, saw their total number of systems fall to 143, bringing their representation on the TOP500 list to its lowest level since the rankings were started 25 years ago. With a total of 35 systems, Japan came in a distant third. Japan, however, did have a new debut on the top ten with their fourth-ranked Gyokou supercomputer, installed at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC).
The next most powerful systems in Japan were the Oakforest-PACS system at the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing and K Computer at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science, coming in ninth and tenth on the November 2017 TOP500 ranking respectively. Although not ranked as highly as Gyokou and Oakforest-PACS, K Computer was judged to be the fastest system overall using the high-performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) benchmark. Unlike the standard LINPACK benchmark, the HPCG benchmark takes into account the mix of computational and data access patterns used in practice, and is thus considered to give a more balanced assessment of performance.
South Korea had five entries on the list, with the country’s top supercomputers, Nuri and Miri at the Korea Meteorological Administration, placed 57th and 58th. India had a total of four systems on the November 2017 TOP500 list, including a system at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre at Indian Institute of Science, which is the country’s highest ranking system at 228th place. Taiwan and Singapore each had one entry on the list, ranked 95th and 177th respectively.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Shutterstock.
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