Intel Xeon chip ban? Pfeh. China triples top 500 supercomputer tally

SC15 The number of Chinese supercomputers among the world's top 500 most powerful number-crunching machines has tripled to 109.

The leap, measured between July and November this year, comes amid a ban on high-end Intel processors leaving the US for the Asian superpower's supercomputer builders. As a result of that export embargo, China is cooking its own chips to slash its reliance on Chipzilla.

Those home-brew components aren't the reason behind the massive gain for the Middle Kingdom, though. The new Chinese entrants are in the low-end of the top-500 table, pushing away aging foreign supers that are due to be replaced in the next few years anyway.

One Chinese vendor in particular, Sugon, appears to have persuaded its telecoms and internet-facing customers to run LINPACK benchmarks on their new clusters, revealing the systems are – hey presto – bonafide supercomputers. OK, they're in the bottom half of the list, but it's a start.

Over the summer, the number of American systems on the top 500 list dropped from 231 to 201, and Europe's tally fell from 141 to 107. Remember, these are the machines governments and organizations are willing to publicly disclose.

"From the casual observer’s perspective, this [tripling of supercomputers] might imply that China is simply in a race to dominate the global supercomputing space with the most (and the most powerful systems)," notes Nicole Hemsoth, coeditor of our sister publication The Next Platform.

"While high performance computing is, indeed, a core part of the technology and scientific investment strategy in China, things are, as usual, not so black and white."

Sure, China is blowing tons of yuan on growing its scientific supercomputing muscle. But a lot of rival nations are in the middle of building their next monster machines, leaving the Chinese clusters to blow away legacy machines working out their retirement in the top-500's lower leagues.

China's 33 petaflops Tianhe-2 still leads the way at number one in the table, followed by the US government's 17.59 petaflops Titan. By 2017, Uncle Sam's 300 petaflops Summit and 100 petaflops Sierra will be online, and in 2018, the 180 petaflops Aurora will be powered up. You can find more insight into the world of supercomputer rivalry here. ®