1. Sunway TaihuLight – China [June 2016]
Chinese computer system that can make 93 quadrillions calculations per second has claimed the top spot on the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The computer called Sunway TaihuLight developed by the National Research Centre of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC) is built entirely using processors designed and made in China. It is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in China.
2. Tianhe-2 – China
The Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2), built by China’s National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) for the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho. It’s the most powerful computer in the world and performs at 33.86 petaflop/s (Pflop/s) on the Linpack benchmark. The system has 3,120,000 computing cores made up from 16,000 computer nodes, each comprising two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi coprocessor chips.
3. Titan – United States
The Titan computer is a Cray XK7 system used by the United States Department of Energy at their Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The former top-ranked Jaguar supercomputer was upgraded in 2012 to become the then most powerful computer (until the Tianhe machine overtook it). The system performs at 17.59 Pflop/s using 261,632 NVIDIA K20x cores.
4. Sequoia – United States
The Sequoia computer is based on the now unsupported IBM BlueGene framework. It has been used to make key advances in climate, astronomy and energy application areas. Located in California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Sequoia platform has achieved 17.17 Pflop/s and uses 1,572,864 cores.
5. K Computer – Japan
The K computer was manufactured by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan. This system hit 10.51 Pflop/s and uses 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.
6. Mira – Unites States
Also built around the Blue Gene architecture, the Mira is one of the older computers on the list. Primarily used by the Unites States Department of Energy (and now housed at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago), it is being succeeded by the upcoming Aurora supercomputer. The Mira computer has peaked at 8.59 Pflop/s and uses 786,432 cores.
7. Piz Daint – Switzerland
The Piz Daint, a Cray XC30 system, is the most powerful computer in Europe. It’s installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland. Piz Daint achieved 6.27 Pflop/s on the Linpack benchmark, using 73,808 NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.
8. Shaheen II – Saudi Arabia
The Shaheen II is the newest computer in the top 10 list. Based around a Cray XC40 system, it went live in 2015 and is the only computer from the region in the top 10. It’s located at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. The platform has performed at 5.536 PFlop/s and uses 196,608 Intel Xeon E5-2698v3 cores.
9. Stampede – United States
The Stampede computer is a Dell PowerEdge C8220 system based around interlinked powerful desktop computers. It’s based at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and has reached 5.17 Pflop/s.
10. Juqueen – Germany
The only other Europe-based computer, housed at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany, is based on the older BlueGene architecture from IBM. It has reached 5.01 Pflop/s.