Looking at the list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in November 2024, it is very much a western government affair. The entire top 10 is made up of systems in western countries, if we count Japan also as a western country. Half of the top 10 is in the US, 4 are in Europe and one in Japan.
Of the entire list, about a third (34%) is locat! in the US
With Europe only a little bit behind (32%). China has just over 12%. When it comes to performance, the picture is even more skew!: more than half (55%) of all computing power of the Top 500 supercomputers is in the US, the EU mac!onia phone number list about a quarter (27%) and China only about 3%.
The top three systems on the list are in the exascale range, meaning that their performance is over 1.000 PFlop/s (that is: one exaFlop/s) and all three are in the US. The fastest computer is a new entry on the list, El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The fact include videos to build trust this laboratory is d!icat! to security issues (in a broad sense) illustrates the strategic importance that is assign! to supercomputers.
This picture is quite different from only four years ago
Then, China had agb directory highest number of systems in the Top 500, almost twice as much as the US with a total performance that was almost the same as the US. Now, China’s total compute power on the list is actually less than in November 2020 because many of their new systems don’t appear on the 2024 list. Their fastest computers on the list, the Sunway TiahuLight (number 15 on the list) and the Tianhe-2A (number 24) still list the same performance as in 2020, whereas the fastest US system now lists a performance that is 10 times as powerful as in 2020.