U.S. Angles to Retake Supercomputer Lead EE Times

The latest Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers turns the spotlight on China, which overtook the United States in the total number of ranked systems and which scored the top two fastest installations on the list. Rather than target systems that test well on the Top500's distributed-memory version of the Linpack benchmarks (High Performance Linpack), the companies aim to render those measurements irrelevant on their way to beating China to exascale computing. China captured not only first and second place in the ranking of the fastest installed systems, but also won the majority share of ranked installations and took the aggregate performance lead, according to the November 2017 Top500 list, which was the 50th one to be published since the ranking debuted in June 1993. According to the Top500 organization, "There is no system from the USA under the Top3. The number of systems installed in China increased to a new record high of 202, compared to 160 on the last list. China now clearly shows a substantially larger number of installations than the USA. China now is also pulling ahead of the USA in the performance category, with China holding 35.4% of the overall installed performance, while the USA is second, with 29.6%."