Top 10 Supercomputers (2017)

10. Trinity, a Cray XC40 running at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has an incredible important job: replaced US nuclear test which last was conducted in September 1992. Speed: 8.1 petaflops.

9. Mira is an IBM BlueGene/Q system cranking away at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. System conducts scientific research in seismology, climatology, material science, transportation efficiency and computational chemistry. Speed: 8.59 petaflops.

8. The K computer is installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. It could perform advanced climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. Speed: 10.5 petaflops.

7. Oakforest-PACS is a Fujitsu PRIMERGY system operated by Japan’s Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing. It’s installed in the Information Technology Center at the University of Tokyo’s Kashiwa Campus, though its number crunching superpowers also benefit the University of Tsukuba. Speed: 13.5 petaflops.

6. Cori, Cray XC40 is named for Gerty Cori, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—and the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science. Cori the supercomputer does its best as the centerpiece of a new Big Data Center , a collaboration between the U.S. National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Intel and five Intel Parallel Computing Centers. Speed: 14 petaflops.

5. Sequoia, the IBM BlueGene/Q supercomputer, installed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It’s tapped to quantify uncertainties “in numerical simulations of nuclear weapons performance” and perform “advanced weapons science calculations". Speed: 17.1 petaflops.

4. Titan, the Cray XK7 megamachine installed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. A University of California, Santa Cruz, research team is on the case, using Titan’s massive compute powers to generate “nearly a trillion-cell simulation of an entire galaxy, which would be the largest simulation of a galaxy ever. Speed: 17.5 petaflops.

3. Piz Daint is a mountain in the Swiss Alps whose name translates roughly to “inner peak.” It’s also the name of the supercomputer, installed in Switzerland, at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Climate scientists in Bern recently tapped Piz Daint to help them understand the causes of Europe’s destructive summer storms. Speed: 19.5 petaflops.

2. Tianhe-2, or as it’s known in English, Milky Way-2, which was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology and is deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China. In April 2015, the U.S. government rejected Intel’s application for an export license that would have increased the power of Tianhe-2’s CPUs and coprocessor boards due to concerns about the supercomputer being used for “nuclear explosive activities.” Speed: 33.8 petaflops.

1. Sunway TaihuLight lives at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China, where its 10 million+ CPU cores have created the biggest, most detailed simulation of the universe. The simulation covers millions of years in the universe’s history, with the goal of helping scientists uncover new discoveries. And it’s “just a warm-up exercise,” says an author of the simulation study. Reportedly China is building “an even larger computer that will be capable of performing over ten times as many calculations as TaihuLight. Speed: 93 petaflops.