China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer nabs top spot in global biannual rankings

China’s supercomputer Tianhe-2 retains its position as the No. 1 system worldwide for the sixth time running, as the country triples the presence of its systems in the Top 500 list despite a global slowdown in performance growth of supercomputers.

The biannual Top 500 list, which is released by researchers from institutions such as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, ranks supercomputer performance by having each system run a Linpark benchmark application.

Developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, Tianhe-2’s performance was almost double that of Titan, a supercomputer installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in US’s Department of Energy which came in second on the list.

Tianhe-2’s performance was 33.86 petaflop per second, compared to Titan’s 17.58 petaflop per second on the benchmark application.

Results show a slowing trend among performance rates in supercomputers. Six of the top 10 systems were installed in 2011 or 2012, and only three supercomputers installed in 2015 made the cut.

In the most current list, there were only two new entries in the Top 10 – US supercomputer Trinity at No. 6 and German system Hazel-Hen at No. 8.

The performance of the last system on the list of 500 has also consistently lagged behind historical trends since 2008. From 1994 to 2008, performance grew 90 per cent each year but has since plunged to a mere 55 per cent per year.