US owns the world's most powerful supercomputer for the fourth consecutive year

The US's Frontier supercomputer tops the rankings for the fourth consecutive year. (Photo: HPE)

The TOP500 global supercomputer speed ranking was just announced on November 13. The list is compiled by international experts every six months. Accordingly, the US Frontier supercomputer ranked first for the fourth consecutive time. The second and third places also belong to the US, demonstrating its technological power that cannot be underestimated.

Frontier, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, achieved a speed of 1.19 exaflops. One exaflop is equivalent to 1,000 petaflops (one billion billion calculations per second).

The Frontier supercomputer has held the top spot on the list since June 2022. It is also the only exascale (one quadrillion operations per second) supercomputer on the list.

Japan's Fugaku supercomputer dropped from tier two to tier four, with a speed of more than 440 petaflops. The Aurora supercomputer, under development at Argonne National Laboratory in the US, is a newcomer to the list, taking second place.

While still in testing, its speed exceeds 580 petaflops. Aurora is expected to be even faster than Frontier once it's complete.

Another newcomer, Microsoft's Eagle, came in third with a speed of more than 560 petaflops. In total, the US has six supercomputers in the top 10 this time around.

Supercomputers are used to simulate nuclear weapons, natural disasters, climate and more, which have huge implications for national security. They use graphics processing units (GPUs) — which excel at processing large amounts of data in parallel — to improve the performance of artificial intelligence, which is increasingly important in the development of generative AI.

China is not in the top 10 this year. The country is developing a successor to Tsinghua University's Sunway TaihuLight, once the world's fastest supercomputer.

(According to Nikkei)

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