Top500 has released the 54th edition of its list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. All of them have one thing in common, which is that they run Linux.
The average speed of the supercomputers included in the list is 1.65 exaflops and the supercomputer now has a performance of 1.14 petaflops compared to 1.02 petaflops when the list was released in June 2019.
The fastest supercomputer in the world can execute 1 quadrillion operations per second.
The top spot on the supercomputer list continues to be held by the Summit System, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a staggering 148.6 petaflops. To give you an idea, a petaflop computer system can perform one quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second. It is a Linux-based supercomputer built by IBM and uses Power9 processors and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
In second place is the Sierra System of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which also uses Linux, but has a speed of 94.6 petaflops.
The third place is taken by the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which was developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology of China. The supercomputer is powered by Sunway's SW26010 processors and has speeds of 93.0 petaflops.
A new supercomputer that appeared on the list is the AiMOS, which was developed by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Computational Innovations (CCI). It occupies the 25th position on the list and delivers a speed of 8.0 petaflops.
The list demonstrates that all supercomputers use Linux, but also the fact that China is the dominant country in building supercomputers. 227 of the 500 supercomputers included in the list were built in China, while only 118 of them were built in the US.
However, the supercomputers being developed in the USA are larger and faster. If we take into account the average performance of the USA supercomputers, it amounts to 37.8% and China follows at 31.9%.
You can find the entire list here.
