The US is ahead of Japan in the list of the top 500 supercomputers.

The US is reclaiming its top spot in the Top 500 supercomputers, but China would have a better hand already.

The United States is once again on the top step of the 500 most powerful supercomputers podium. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Frontier system based on AMD EPYC processors overtook last year’s champion, Japan’s Fugaku ARM A64X system. This vehicle is still in the integration and testing phase at ORNL, Tennessee, but will eventually be used by the US Air Force and the US Department of Energy.

USA returns to the top spot in the ranking of the 500 best supercomputers

Powered by the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Cray EX platform, the Frontier is by far the best machine. This is the first true (known) exaflop system to achieve at least 1.1 exaflop in the Linmark test. Fugaku, on the other hand, can only manage half as much, 442 petaflops, which was still enough to keep him in first place for the past two years.

Frontier is also one of the most efficient supercomputers. With a performance of 52.23 gigaflops per watt, it outperforms the Japanese MN-3 system and ranks first on the Green500 list. “The fact that the most powerful machine in the world is also the most efficient in terms of energy management is breathtaking,” ORNL director Thomas Zacharias said during a press conference.

But China would be better off in the hands of

Other machines in the top 10 include another HPE creation with Cray EX installed at EuroHPC in Finland (151.9 petaflops), an IBM Summit system with 22-core Power CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs (148.8 petaflops) and Lawrence Livermore’s Sierra, more modest. a version of Summit that still offers 94.6 petaflops.

China occupies two places in this top ten thanks to Sunway TaihuLight from the National Research Center for Parallel Computing and Technology (NRCPC) and Tianhe-2A developed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). However, China is already rumored to have two exaflop-scale systems, according to the Linmark benchmark, on the new Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3. At the same time, due to the difficult situation with semiconductors, China would prefer not to communicate on this topic.