Dive Brief:

• China now hosts 109 of the high-performance computing systems on a list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Six months ago the country had just 37 machines on the list.
• The U.S. tally of 200 is its lowest level since computer scientists began compiling the list in 1993.
• The results, released Monday, are important because they serve as a “shorthand way of viewing international competitiveness in computer simulations.”

Dive Insight:

The results reflect an acceleration of high-performance computing in China, said Horst Simon, deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“China has recognized the value of high-performance computing for modeling and simulation and has ramped up simulations and created a broad base of installations that is very competitive with the U.S.," said Simon.

Chinese companies have also become better at marketing and are now much more aggressive in encouraging their customers to run the benchmarking tests required to get on the list, said Simon.

“The Chinese have opened up to some American-style marketing efforts to make sure they get the visibility and the press.”

Currently, the world’s most powerful supercomputer is Tianhe-2, which is capable of performing 33.86 quadrillion calculations a second.