The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory staked its claim to retake the lead from China in the world’s supercomputer race with a machine capable of performing 200 quadrillion calculations a second.
That 200-petaflop speed is roughly eight times as fast as the current top-rated U.S. supercomputer, built by Seattle-based Cray and known as Titan. It’s twice as fast as the record currently held by China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which is listed at 93.01 petaflops on last November’s authoritative TOP500 list.
Chinese supercomputers have held the No. 1 spot on the TOP500 list since 2013. The next edition of the list is due to come out later this month.
