As the artificial intelligence race heats up, so does the global competition for computing power — something the boom would be impossible without.
Supercomputing, which is a type of high-performance computing, involves multiple central processing units, or CPUs, grouped into compute nodes that communicate to solve problems. This technology has been used to discover new materials for battery and chip development, in disease research, and increasingly to run AI workloads.
The U.S. is home to five of the 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world and has 173 of the leading systems worldwide, according to the 64th edition of the TOP500. These supercomputers process information at mind-boggling speeds, measured in “flops,” the number of calculations they can do each second. To put it in perspective, while modern smartphones can handle trillions of calculations per second, today’s top supercomputers work in petaflops, equal to a thousand trillion calculations every second.
And that’s not even the limit: the three most powerful supercomputers in the world — all located in the U.S. — have reached exascale computing, performing at least one quintillion calculations per second.
Here are the top 10 countries by maximum performance, measured in teraflops, or one trillion floating-point operations per second, based on the TOP500’s supercomputer rankings.
South Korea has 13 supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 213,091 teraflops.
Spain has three supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 221,873 teraflops.
France has 24 supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 298,086 teraflops.
China has 63 supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 319,062 teraflops.
Finland has three supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 391,388 teraflops.
The Lumi system, which is installed at a EuroHPC center at the CSC — IT Center for Science in Espoo, Finland, is the eighth most-powerful supercomputer in the world and operates at 379.7 petaflops (or 379.7 quadrillion calculations per second).
Germany has 40 supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 399,728 teraflops.
Switzerland has five supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 473,517 teraflops.
The Alps system, which is installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, Switzerland, is the seventh most-powerful supercomputer in the world and reaches 434.9 petaflops (or 434.9 quadrillion calculations per second).
Italy has 14 supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 849,088 teraflops.
The Leonardo system, which is installed at a CINECA EuroHPC site in Italy delivers 241.2 petaflops (or 241.2 quadrillion calculations per second), making it the ninth most-powerful supercomputer in the world.
Japan has 34 supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 940,710 teraflops.
The Fugaku system, which is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, is the sixth most-powerful supercomputer in the world.
On the High-Performance Conjugate Gradient benchmark, Fugaku has been the top-ranked supercomputer since June 2020, performing at 442.0 petaflops (or 442.0 quadrillion calculations per second).
The United States has 173 supercomputers in the TOP500 rankings, reaching a maximum performance of 6,477,869 teraflops.
The El Capitan system, which is installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, is the most powerful supercomputer in the world capable of 2.74 exaflops (or 2.74 quintillion calculations per second).
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