China extends lead in quantity of Top500 supercomputers

China extended its dominance in a list of the world's fastest supercomputers by the number of systems, according to a semi-annual ranking of the Top500 published on Monday.

The share of installations in China continues to rise strongly with 228 (45.6 percent) of all systems now listed as being installed in China. The share of system listed in the United States remains near its all time low at 23.4 percent.

The aggregate performance gap between China and the United States shrunk. The US systems translated to a 37.1 percent share, while China is close behind with a 32.3-percent performance share.

The list published in June had the United States with 38.4 percent of the aggregate performance and China with 29.9 percent.

The aggregate performance of the 500 systems, based on the High Performance Linpack benchmark, continued to rise, sitting at 1.65 exaflops.

Also, as a reflection of China's lead in numbers, the top three system manufacturers with regard to the number of installations are Lenovo, Sugon, and Inspur. But Intel has maintained the dominance at the chip level, with its processors present in about 94 percent of all systems.

The top 10 of the list remained unchanged as Summit and Sierra, both IBM-built supercomputers, grabbed the top two spots, followed by two Chinese systems, Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2A.

The entry level to the list has risen to 1.14 petaflops, up from 1.02 petaflops in the previous list in June 2019, according to the Top500 list.