U.S. Says It Reclaimed Supercomputer Crown From China

The competition for the world's fastest computer, ranked twice a year by computer scientists in the U.S. and Germany, is a point of national pride. The last time a U.S. computer held the top spot was in November 2012. The next ranking on June 25 comes against a backdrop of escalating tensions between the U.S. and China over trade and leadership in artificial intelligence and 5G wireless networks, advanced technologies deemed vital to national security. The new supercomputer, dubbed Summit and housed at the agency's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, can perform 200,000 trillion calculations a second, according to IBM--200 petaflops in industry parlance. That is eight times more powerful than Titan, a supercomputer made by Cray Inc., the lab's previous top performer.