China overtakes the US in supercomputers for the first time

93-petaflop per second Sunway TaihuLight takes top spot as China outnumbers the US in supercomputers for the first time

China has taken the top-spot in the latest TOP500 supercomputer rankings with a home-grown machine featuring microprocessors designed and made in China - and China now outnumbers the US for supercomputers for the first time.

China's Sunway TaihuLight took the crown as the world's faster computer from the Intel-based Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which had claimed the top-spot for the past six TOP500 rankings, which are released every six months.

The Sunway TaihuLight boasts a power capacity of 93 petaflops per second (petaflops/s) on the LINPACK benchmark. Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology, it is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, Sunway TaihuLight.

The latest TOP500 rankings were unveiled today at the International Supercomputer Conference in Frankfurt.

The Sunway TaihuLight claims 10,649,600 compute cores comprising 40,960 nodes, and is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2 (which posted a LINPACK performance of 33.86 petaflop/s).

The peak power consumption under load (running the HPL benchmark) is 15.37 megawatts, or six gigaflops per watt. This enables the TaihuLight system to also grab one of the top spots on the Green500 as well.

The US claimed third-place with Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, achieving 17.59 petaflop/s.

The TOP500 rankings, over the years, have tended to reflect shifting economic fortunes. It now has more supercomputers based in China than the US for the first time. With a surge in industrial and research installations registered over the past few years, China leads with 167 systems in the TOP500, with the US second with 165. Europe's share declined from 107 to 105 - and the UK can boast just 12.

Indeed, one of the biggest supercomputer installations in the UK will be at the Met Office in Exeter.

China also leads the performance category, thanks to the Sunway TaihuLight and the Tianhe-2 supercomputers in the top two spots.

America isn't taking this lying down, however. In November 2014, the US government decided to throw $325m at Intel and NVIDIA to build a 150-petaflop machine, although that has yet to be launched.

While supercomputer specialist Cray occupied four of the top 10 slots, Intel dominated in terms of microprocessors. Some 455 of the 500 systems packed Intel microprocessors, while IBM Power powered just 23 and AMD Opteron lies at the heart of 13 systems.

Intriguingly, perhaps, 93 systems in the ranking use co-processors, down from 104 in the last rankings just six months ago. Sixty-seven of these use NVIDIA chips, 26 systems use Intel Xeon Phi technology, three use ATI Radeon, and two use PEZY technology. Three systems use a combination of NVIDIA and Intel Xeon Phi accelerators/coprocessors.