LiU’s Tetralith ranks 74th in TOP500 list

For the first time, every one of the list’s 500 supercomputers has a computing power of at least one petaflop (1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second). The combined computing power of all the computers on the list is 1.56 exaflops (10¹⁸ floating point operations per second).

After topping the list for a few years, the Chinese supercomputers dropped to third and fourth places. Still, China has more computers on the TOP500 list than any other country. 44 per cent of all the supercomputers are in China, while just 22.3 per cent are in the United States. However as the American supercomputers are more powerful, their total computing power is only a few percentage points below that of the Chinese machines.

The TOP500 list is headed by two American supercomputers: Summit and Sierra. Summit is installed at the Department of Energy´s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and Sierra at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

In the ranking, which is based on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, Summit achieved up to 148.6 petaflops and up to Sierra 94.6 petaflops. Both had GPUs, i.e. graphics cards developed specially for calculation in artificial intelligence.

Third and fourth places go to China, with Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputer Center in Wuxi (93.0 petaflops) and Milky Way-2A, developed by China´s National University of Defense Technology, but installed in Linköping’s sister city Guangzhou. Milky Way-2A reached 61.4 petaflops.

In fifth place is another American supercomputer, and in sixth, the first European: Piz Daint at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, CSCS.

Tetralith, installed at LiU’s National Supercomputer Center, is ranked 74th. It reached 2.969 petaflops, making it the most powerful in the Nordic region.
In place 151 is KTH’s Beskow, with 1.8 petaflops.

See the complete list of Top 500