Top 10 supercomputers
Supercomputers, although often assigned to the realm of science fiction or advanced academic study, are often vitally important devices which have shed light on numerous complex questions and functions which were previously unachievable.
Despite this the average computer user is often unaware of what these machines are capable of or which are the most powerful. With this in mind we have listed the top ten super computers globally in terms of performance.
The speed of supercomputers is currently measured in terms of PETAflops. And TERAflops. These are defined as a measure of a computer’s processing speed and can be understood and a thousand trillion and one trillion floating point operations per second respectively.
As a point of reference ATI’s Radeon R800 family of 40 nanometre GPUs can reach speeds of up to 3.04 TERAflops. A TERAflop is one thousandth the measurement of a PETAflop.
The statistics below are based on annual findings by supercomputer analyst Top 500.
| Position | Computer | Maximum performance achieved | Theoretical performance | Country |
| 1 | Jaguar | 1.75 PETAflops | 2.33 PETAflops | United States |
| 2 | Roadrunner | 1.04 PETAflops | 1.37 PETAflops | United States |
| 3 | Kraken XT5 | 831 TERAflops | 1.02 PETAflops | United States |
| 4 | Jugene | 825 TERAflops | 1 PETAflops | Germany |
| 5 | Tianhe-1 | 563 TERAflops | 1.2 PETAflops | China |
| 6 | Pleiades | 544 TERAflops | 673 TERAflops | United States |
| 7 | BlueGene/L | 478 TERAflops | 596 TERAflops | United States |
| 8 | BlueGene/P | 458 TERAflops | 557 TERAflops | United States |
| 9 | Ranger | 433 TERAflops | 579 TERAflops | United States |
| 10 | Red Sky | 423 TERAflops | 487 TERAflops | United States |
Of the top five hundred supercomputers globally 55.4% are found in the United States. This is followed by 9% in the United Kingdom and 5.4% in Germany.
Only one supercomputer of the five hundred most powerful in the world resides in Africa. This can be found at the Centre for High Performance Computing in South Africa and ranks number 311 on the list with 2624 cores.
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