China, Japan, and India represent strongly in latest top 500 supercomputers list

Asian countries have not yet matched the development levels of the West, but when it comes to supercomputers it’s a different story. Nations like China, Japan, India, and Korea have world-leading supercomputers alongside the US, Germany, and France. Who tops the list? It’s China.

China’s Intel-powered Tianhe-2 retains the top slot ahead of America’s Titan. Aside from China’s speediest Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the nation is the strongest in Asia with 65 supercomputers, followed by Japan and India with 30 and 15 each, respectively.

All this new data comes from the 42nd worldwide edition of the Top 500 supercomputers list.

The Tianhe-2 is developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology and can compute at 33.86 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the LINPACK Benchmark.

Indian number-crunching

Interestingly, 12 supercomputers ranked in the top 500 list are based in India. These have excelled specifically in the areas of weather forecasting and seismic analysis.

These 12 Indian supercomputers in India are Intel HPC-powered. The country’s count has doubled in the last year.

Among the top 10 supercomputers in the world, half of them are IBM-made.

Japan’s K computer – a Fujitsu system based at the RIKEN Advance Institute for Computational Science (AICS) – holds the fourth spot in the global top 10.

In case you’re curious, here’s the entire top 500:

(Editing by Steven Millward)