U.S. Dominates List Of World's Top Ten Fastest Supercomputers, But China Takes The No. 1 Spot

The biannual TOP500 report was released Monday and revealed the world's fastest supercomputers.  The U.S. had the most supercomputers in the top ten, but China's Tianhe-2 was deemed the fastest.

The U.S. had supercomputers in second, third, fifth, sixth, and eighth place, The Daily Mail reports. But China's Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocked the U.S. Department of Energy's Titan machine off the number 1 spot from the previous list. Tianhe-2 achieved 17.59 petaflops per second and is almost twice as fast as the previous U.S. record holder.

Tianhe-2 was developed by the National University of Defense Technology in central China's Changsha city, the Associated Press reports. The supercomputer is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. That's the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

In other words, Tianhe-2 is faster than 338 million ordinary PCs put together, The Daily Mail says.

Japan's K computer is in the fourth spot. Germany's Juqueen and SuperMuc are in seventh and ninth place, while Tianhe-2's predecessor, Tianhe-1A, is tenth.

The Tianhe-1A placed first in November 2010 until Japan's K computer overtook it a few months later.

Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modeling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions and designing jetliners, the Associated Press writes.

Tianhe-2 is built entirely with Intel processors, Forbes reports. However, China is completely responsible for the machine, TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra said in a news release.

"Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part," Dongarra said. "That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese."

Dongarram toured the Tianhe-2 development facility in May.

The Chinese government sponsored the project, but did not expect the computer to be fully functional until 2015. The government plans to install the supercomputer at the National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou, where it will be used for research and education.