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Published: November 14, 2017 | Source: TOP500 | Author: Mark Campbell

China has now surpassed the US in the world’s TOP500 Supercomputer list

China has now surpassed the US in the world's TOP500 Supercomputer list

China has now surpassed the US in the world’s TOP500 Supercomputer list

TOP500 has updated their list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, showing China overtake the US for the first time in terms of both system number and combined compute performance. This list also does the US’ presence on the list shrink to its lowest point since the list’s inception 20 years ago.  

Today China sits on top of this list with 202 systems, with the US lagging behind with only 143 systems, with Japan sitting in third place with 35 systems and Germany, France and the UK coming in with 20, 18 and 15 systems respectively. 

When looking at the combined compute performance that these systems offer, China delivers 35.4% of the list’s combined computational power, while the US offers 29.6% of the list’s combined compute performance. This shows that while China is on top in terms of numbers and performance, the US does deliver higher levels of compute performance per system on average. 

China has now surpassed the US in the world's TOP500 Supercomputer listThis data shows that China is taking Supercomputing seriously, with the US’ system count on the TOP500 dropping from 169 o 143 in just six months while China’s system count has increased from 160 to 202.   

One thing to note here is that a lot of these systems are not directly comparable, given the widely different hardware that is used in each system, be it based on CPUs, GPUs or other forms of compute hardware. Even so, the list does represent the most powerful computers in the world, even if each of them serves very different use cases. 

You can join the discussion on China surpassing the US in the TOP500 supercomputer list on the OC3D Forums. 

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