The 47th edition of the list of TOP 500 supercomputers in the world has been announced. This time another Chinese supercomputer called “Sunway TaihuLight” has replaced “Tianhe-2” which had occupied the top position for the last six times.
The list is updated twice a year (June and November) on the basis of the “LINPACK Benchmark”.
The Sunway TaihuLight is built entirely of processors designed and made in China unlike Tianhe-2 which is an Intel based supercomputer ( Intel is an American Company).
The processing speed of a supercomputer is measured in floating point operations per second (flops) or the number of calculations it can perform in a second.
Sunway TaihuLight can perform 93 quadrillions calculations per second or 93 petaflops*/s and is twice as fast and thrice as efficient as Tianhe-2 (33.86 petaflops/s).
Top 10 supercomputers
- Sunway TaihuLight -China
- Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) – China
- Titan -US
- Sequoia-US
- K Computer- Japan
- Mira- US
- Trinity- US
- Piz Daint- Switzerland
- Hazel Hen- Germany
- Shaheen II – Saudi Arabia
This is the first time since the inception of the list in 1993 that the US is not home to the largest number of systems.
*petaflops= 10^15 flops
