{"id":373488,"date":"2017-11-14T06:35:11","date_gmt":"2017-11-14T06:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=373488"},"modified":"2017-11-14T05:56:54","modified_gmt":"2017-11-14T05:56:54","slug":"china-dominates-top-supercomputers-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=373488","title":{"rendered":"China dominates top supercomputers list"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"story-body__introduction\">China has overtaken the US to have the most supercomputers in the list of the world&#8217;s fastest 500 systems.<\/p>\n<p>The communist nation accounted for 202 of the globe&#8217;s highest performance machines, according to the\u00a0latest Top500 survey.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, the US had 143. That marks its lowest level since the bi-annual study began, 25 years ago, but still secured it second place.<\/p>\n<p>Japan placed third with 35 systems, and Germany fourth with 20.<\/p>\n<p>In the previous survey,\u00a0published in June, the US still had a lead of 169 supercomputers to China&#8217;s 160.<\/p>\n<p>The reversal of fortunes reflects China&#8217;s increased investment in research and development &#8211;\u00a0according to a recent study, the country now accounts for about 20% of the world&#8217;s total R&amp;D expenditure.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"story-body__crosshead\">Scientific studies<\/h2>\n<p>Supercomputers are typically large, expensive systems featuring tens of thousands of processors designed to carry out specialised calculation-intensive tasks.<\/p>\n<p>Examples include:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"story-body__unordered-list\">\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\">climate change studies<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\">nuclear weapons simulations<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\">oil prospecting<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\">weather forecasting<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\">DNA sequencing<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\">modelling biomolecules<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Performance is measured in petaflops (one thousand trillion floating point operations per second).<\/p>\n<p>A flop can be thought of as a step in a calculation.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"media-landscape has-caption full-width\"><span class=\"image-and-copyright-container\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"responsive-image__img js-image-replace\" src=\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/62D7\/production\/_98730352_d9d63e13-f649-4075-857c-9e64772bfd58.jpg\" alt=\"DKRZ supercomputer\" width=\"976\" height=\"549\" data-highest-encountered-width=\"624\" \/><\/span><\/figure>\n<p>China&#8217;s fastest computer &#8211; the Sunway TaihuLight &#8211; maintained its lead as the world&#8217;s speediest, performing at 93 petaflops.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, the US&#8217;s fastest &#8211; Titan &#8211; ranks fifth in the world, with a maximum performance of 17.6 petaflops.<\/p>\n<p>The list&#8217;s authors said the latest figures also indicated China had overtaken the United States in terms of aggregate performance, accounting for 35.4% of the list&#8217;s total processing power versus the US&#8217;s 29.6%.<\/p>\n<p>Erich Strohmaier &#8211; one of the survey&#8217;s co-founders &#8211; told the BBC that many of the Chinese systems had been created to earn money, with the owners renting out their processing power to local and international firms.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;At the very high end &#8211; the systems in the top 10 &#8211; those are there for two reasons,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;One is simply the prestige attached with [being in the lead] in a market that used to be a prime example of US technology dominance.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The other is to do with scientific exploration and national security &#8211; a lot of these systems are used for calculations related to weapons systems.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>China has overtaken the US to have the most supercomputers in the list of the world&#8217;s fastest 500 systems. The communist nation accounted for 202 of the globe&#8217;s highest performance machines, according to the\u00a0latest Top500 survey. By contrast, the US had 143. That marks its lowest level since the bi-annual study began, 25 years ago, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[11618,11617],"class_list":["post-373488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-china-technology","tag-supercomputers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=373488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=373488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=373488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=373488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}