Is China now the world's top supercomputer power?‎ - Science & Technology

China has built the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, which is capable of 2.57 quadrillion computing operations per second, pulling ahead of the United States in the global supercomputing race.

The lead of the China-made system was confirmed by the 36th edition of TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, which was released Monday on the TOP500 list website.

Tianhe-1A was followed by the former No. 1 system, the U.S.-made Cray XT5 "Jaguar" at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee.

The Jaguar system performs at 1.75 quadrillion per second, 92 percent slower than Tianhe-1A, running Linpack, the benchmark used to officially determine the speed of supercomputers.

India, in contrast, continues to lag far behind and has only four supercomputers in the top 500 — this constitutes less than 1% of the global share.

Among the four Indian supercomputers in the top 500, EKA, located at the Computational Research Laboratories Ltd (CRL) of Tata Sons is the highest ranking at No. 47 with a theoretical peak performance of 172.224 teraflops. However, it is quite a fall from the No. 4 ranking it managed in 2007 —the highest ranking an Indian system ever achieved.