China Tops List of World’s Top 500 Super Computers, Surpasses US in Number

China’s super computers the Sunway Taihu Light and Tianhe-2 have held onto their first- and second-place rankings in a new listing of the world’s Top 500 supercomputers, released November 13. The list also showed the number of Chinese supercomputers in the Top 500 has also surpassed the number in in the United States.

The Top 500 list is updated every six months. China’s Sunway Taihu Light and Tianhe-2, whose floating point calculations run at 93 petaflops and 33.9 petaflops, have held the first two positions for two years.

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The United States has not had a supercomputer ranking in the Top 3 for two years. An industry insider said the US Department of Energy is sponsoring two new supercomputers. One supercomputer will have a computing capacity twice that of the Sunway Taihu Light. These two computers are expected to be put into use in next year. The US may have the world’s fastest supercomputers within six months.

China first surpassed the US by a narrow margin of 167 to 165 last June. In November, both countries had 171 computers on the list and tied for first place. In June, the US won first place with 169 against China’s 159.

But this time, China was on the list with a record 202 supercomputers, while the US dropped to 144.