The Top 10 Super Computers in the world are ranked by their performance on the linpack benchmark. For the first time, a supercomputer based in the Middle East has appeared in the top 10.
10. Trinity
Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Trinity makes the third straight list, with its 8.1 Petaflops of Linpack performance good for 10<sup>th</sup> place. It’s one of four Cray-built machines on November’s list, using just over 300,000 total processor cores.
9. Mira
Mira, located at the Argonne National Laboratory, has been on the list since 2012, posting an 8.59 mark using more than 786,000 processor cores. It’s one of just two IBM Blue Gene/Q models left in the top 10, as those machines have ceased to dominate the list as they once did.
8. Piz Daint
The only European entrant into the latest top 10 – and in fact, the only one not from the U.S. or East Asia – Piz Daint is a 9.78 petaflop machine named after an Alp, housed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center in Lugano.
7. K Computers
The old reliable of the list sinks to 7th place, but it’s been in the mix since 2011, when it was the fastest supercomputer in the world. It’s still noticeably less energy efficient than more recently built entrants, but it still cranks out 10.5 petaflops of computing power.
6. Oakforest-PACS
The first new entry in this year’s top 10 is a brand-new supercomputer at Japan’s Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing, which provides 13.5 petaflops of performance from 556,000 processor cores.
5. Cori
The other debutant is an American – the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s Cori is named for biochemist Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize. The computer that bears her name hits the 14 petaflop mark on the Linpack benchmark, using 622,000 total cores.
4. Sequoia
Sequoia contains a whopping 1.5 million total cores, which drive a total of 17.1 petaflops of performance. It resides at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and has been on the top 10 list since 2012.
3. Titan
The mightiest supercomputer in the U.S., Titan is the workhorse of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and its 17.6 petaflops of horsepower are good for third place on its second consecutive list. Titan had the top spot when it debuted on 2012’s second list, and has occupied second place before dropping to third in the last one.
2. Tianhe II
The Chinese National University of Defense Technology’s Milky Way-2 packs 33.86 petaflops of processing power, which has been enough to put it at the top of every list on which it has appeared (its first was in June 2013), until the last one. This time, it remains in second place, behind only.
1. Sunway TaihuLight
The monstrous Sunway TaihuLight, run by China’s National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. At 93 petaflops, it’s got roughly triple the performance of Tianhe-2, and more than five times the horsepower of Titan in third place.