Tianhe-2, the supercomputer developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, has been ranked as the world's fastest for the fourth consecutive time.

The Chinese supercomputer retained its position as the world's fastest system with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark, according to the 44th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

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This year's ranking remained little changed among the top-10 fastest supercomputer with the only new entry, a 3.57 petaflop/s Cray CS-Storm system installed at an undisclosed U.S. government site, coming in at number 10.

Despite being able to boast the world's fastest computer, China saw the number of its systems on the list decline to 61, compared to 76 in June 2014, the last time the rankings came out. Over the same period, Japan increased its number of systems from 30 to 32.

Although the U.S. is still home of the supercomputer with the most overall systems at 231, this is down from 233 in June 2014, and 265 on the November 2013 list. Top500 says that "The U.S. is nearing its historical low number on the list."

The number of European systems increased to 130, up from the 116 reported in last June's ranking, while the number of systems across Asia fell to 120 from 132.

The TOP500 list has been ranking the world's supercomputers since 1993, with the goal of providing a consistent measure of the performance growth of supercomputers. The group doesn't define "supercomputer," but uses a benchmark to rank systems and to decide if they qualify for the TOP500 list. All systems are ranked according to performance running the same Linpack benchmark application.

Performance Growth Slowing

In the most recent ranking, the overall growth rates of performance continues to be at historically low values for the last two years.

The TOP500 says that deceleration in average performance of all 500 systems is influenced by the very large systems at the top of the list.

"Recent installations of very large systems - up to June 2013 - have counteracted the reduced growth rate at the bottom of the list," the group said in a statement. "But with few new systems at the top of the past few lists, the overall growth rate is now slowing."

This is supported by the fact that the performance of the last system on the list has consistently lagged behind historical growth trends for the past five years. That rate is now at 55 percent a year; however, between 1994 and 2008 the annual growth rate for the No. 500 systems' performance was 90 percent.

Other Highlights

* Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 309 Pflop/s, compared to 274 Pflop/s in June and 250 Pflop/s from one year ago.  

* There are 50 systems with performance greater than 1 petaflop/s on the list, up from 37 six months ago.

* The No. 1 system, Tianhe-2, and the No. 7 system, Stampede, use Intel Xeon Phi processors to speed up their computational rate. The No. 2 system, Titan, and the No. 6 system, Piz Daint, use NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation.

* A total of 75 systems on the list use accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 62 last year. Of these, 50 use NVIDIA chips, three use ATI Radeon, and there are now 25 systems with Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi).

* Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (85.8 percent) of TOP500 systems.

* HP has the lead in systems with 179 (36 percent) compared to IBM with 153 systems (30 percent).

TagsChina’s Tianhe-2 Ranked Fastest Supercomputer, Tianhe-2, TOP500 list, world’s most powerful supercomputers, HP, IBM Intel, National University of Defense Technology