Top 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world

These supercomputers are used in many fields such as simulating nuclear missile tests, weather forecasting, climate research, and testing computer encryption strength.

Supercomputers are giant systems with computing power millions of times greater than conventional devices in solving complex problems of the world. They are applied in many fields such as simulating nuclear missile tests, weather forecasting, climate research, testing the coding power of computers.

The list of the world's 10 most powerful supercomputers is extracted from the latest published Top500 supercomputer rankings.

The Top500 project on supercomputers has been carried out annually since 1993 by famous experts such as Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee; Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the US Energy Research Scientific Computing Center; Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim. The June and November rankings are usually announced online or at the International Supercomputing Conference and the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference.

The countries with the most powerful supercomputers in the world's top 10 are the US, China, Japan, Finland and Italy.

1. Frontier (USA)

The world's most powerful supercomputer Frontier.

The Frontier system at the US's Oak Ridge National Laboratory became the first supercomputer to surpass the one-trillion-calculation-per-second threshold last year.

This supercomputer was built by the US Department of Energy. It has previously dethroned the Fugaku system of the Japanese Riken Center for Computational Science.

In benchmark testing, Frontier achieved 1.19 exaflops, or 1.19 quintillion calculations per second. The system, built on HP's CrayEX platform, contains 9,400 2 GHz AMD EPYC 64C processors and 37,000 AMD Instinct 250X GPUs, housed in 74 component cabinets, each weighing more than 3,600 kg.

2. Fugaku (Japan)

Previously, Fugaku was the world's most powerful supercomputer in 2020 - 2021. This system was jointly developed by Fujitsu and the Riken Research Institute, reaching a speed of 442 petaflops (442 quadrillion calculations per second), and was used to research Covid-19 in 2021. This supercomputer is widely used in industry.

3. Lumi (Finland)

Lumi is the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and the third in the world with a computing capacity of 309 petaflops.

4. Leonardo (Italy)

The supercomputer located in Bologna has a computing power of 238.7 petaflops. The system uses Intel's Xeon Platinum 8358 32C chip along with Nvidia's A100 and HDR100 processors. Leonardo will be operational from November 2022, with a construction cost of 240 million USD. The operating software is provided by Intel and Nvidia.

5. IBM Summit (USA)

The size of two tennis courts, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has an average performance of 148.6 petaflops and a peak performance of 200 petaflops. IBM's system weighs a total of 340 tons, is equipped with 9,216 22-core IBM Power9 central processors, 27,648 Nvidia Tesla V100 graphics processors, and requires 15,000 liters of water per minute for cooling.

This supercomputer was ranked number one in the world in 2018 and 2019.

6. IBM Sierra (USA)

IBM Sierra comes in sixth with 94.6 petaflops of computing power. Sierra, which uses a combination of processors from IBM and Nvidia, is based in Livermore, California. Sierra's highest position was second place in 2018 and 2019.

7. Sunway TaihuLight (China)

The Sunway TaihuLight has a computing power of 93 petaflops. The system is located at the National Research Center for Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC) in Wuxi City. It uses 40,960 SW26010 64-bit RISC processors based on the Sunway architecture, each chip containing 256 processing cores and four additional cores for system management, bringing the total number of processing cores to 10,649,600 across the system.

8. Perlmutter (USA)

Perlmutter has a computing power of 70.87 petaflops, using AMD and Nvidia chips. This supercomputer is located at the US National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), used by the US Department of Energy for nuclear reaction simulation, climate forecasting, and biological research.

9. Selene (USA)

Selene, a 63.46 petaflop machine built by Nvidia in 2020 for Covid-19 research, is located at Nvidia's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. The system uses mainly AMD and Nvidia chips.

10. Tianhe-2A (China)

Tianhe-2A is located at the National Supercomputing Center NUDT in Guangzhou. Developed by a team of 1,300 Chinese scientists and engineers, the system held the world's most powerful position in 2013, 2014 and 2015.