China maintains No. 1, No. 2 supercomputing systems as HPC gets more power
Credit: Top500
China supercomputers maintained the top spots in the Top500 list in November as petascale systems dominated the list.
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Both China and the US claim 171 systems in the latest rankings, or two-thirds of the Top500 list. China's Sunway TaihuLight at 93 petaflops and Tianhe-2 at 34 petaflops maintained the No. 1 and No. 2 spots.
According to the Top500 list, Germany, Japan, France, and the UK also were fairly well represented. The primary surge in the list by country came from China. For instance, the US had 200 systems on the list a year ago and China had 108.
As for Linpack scores, a way to measure peak performance of a supercomputer, China and the US are roughly even. Systems with more than one petaflop now own the first 117 positions, up from 81 a year ago.
Among the other key items:
- Intel is represented in 92.4 percent of the systems.
- IBM POWER processors are in 22 systems with AMD owning seven.
- 60 systems use Nvidia GPUs.
- HPE has the most systems with 140 and that figure includes 28 systems from SGI, which was acquired. Lenovo is No. 2 with 92 systems.
- Industry occupies most of the installations with research and academic about even.