China's Tianhe-2 tops the list of the world's supercomputer's for the third time in a row, using more than twice the power and fives times the processing cores to beat out the United States' Titan.
The Tianhe-2, which translates roughly to "MilkyWay-2," was the second iteration of the National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou's Tianhe super computer.
The Tianhe-2 emerged on the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites' biannual list of super computers in June 2013, boasting the peak and max teraflop computations of 33862.7 and 54902.4, respectively.
FLOPS, or Floating-Point Operations per Second, is a benchmark of processing power established by multiplying the number of processors inside of a computer by their clock cycles and multiplying that number by the floating point operations the processors are capable of achieving. Floating points are systems the computer uses to approximate real number where the decimal point could lie anywhere, or "float."
To put the Tianhe-2's peak of 54902.4 teraflops into perspective, a PlayStation 4 operates at 1.8 teraflops and an Xbox One operates at 1.3.
Top 500 Supercomputer Sites' rankings of the world's fastest supercomputers has enabled analysts to gauge the development of the world's supercomputers. The site's own analysts have determined that the growth in power of supercomputers has slowed to historical lows, though the top computers may be skewing the numbers and giving the illusion that growth has slowed down quite so drastically.
"Recent installations of very large systems -- up to June 2013 -- have counteracted the reduced growth rate at the bottom of the list, but with few new systems at the top of the past few lists, the overall growth rate is now slowing," stated the press release. "This offers an indication that the market for the very largest systems might currently behave differently from the market of mid-sized and smaller supercomputers."
The supercomputers that round out the top five in the most recent ranking include the US' Titan in at second, the US's Sequoia in at third, Japan's K Computer in at fourth and the US's Mira ranking fifth.
Though the United States' entries on the list have dropped by 32, the country dominates the list in terms of sheer entrants at it had 233 computers listed in the rankings. China had 76 computers that made the list.
Other points of note in the company's June 2013 release include HP edging IBM in terms of systems, 182 supercomputers to 176, and the rise of Nvidia and AMD co-processors from 53 in the last ranking to 66 in the latest report.
A breakdown by country: Chinese mainland, 76 systems, up from 63 on the previous list; Britain, with 30; Japan, up to 30 from 28 on the previous list; France, with 27; and Germany, with 23.
