What is the latest supercomputer rankings?

The power and speed of supercomputers as compared to the traditional central processing units can be attributed to innovative design methodology which allows the supercomputers to perform dozens of tasks in parallel. The memory hierarchy of a supercomputer is critically designed so as to make sure that the processor is provided with instructions and data all the time and this single factor is often the only reason behind the marked difference between supercomputers and other slower computers. The supercomputers are highly focused at elimination of software serialization and at the same time use hardware to tackle the rest of the performance bottlenecks.

Vector processing techniques are the ones usually used in supercomputers due to the demand of high performance applications. The input-output system of a supercomputer is designed to sustain high bandwidth. The latency is not much of an issue because supercomputers are usually not used for transaction processing.

Here is the list of the top 10 supercomputers according to the 37th TOP500 list:

1. Fujitsu K computer (Japan)

2. NUDT Tianhe-1A (China)

3. Cray Jaguar (United States)

4. Dawning Nebulae (China)

5. NEC/HP TSUBAME 2.0 (Japan)

6. Cray Cielo (United States)

7. SGI Pleiades (United States)

8. Cray Hopper (United States)

9. Bull SA Tera 100 (France)

10. IBM Roadrunner (United States)