China has retained the bragging rights to having the world's fastest supercomputer for the sixth straight year as Tianhe-2 continues to blow away the competition.

Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China's National University of Defense Technology and powered by Intel Xeon Phi processors, was named the world's fastest supercomputer by the Top500 Project.

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Meaning "Milky Way" in Mandarin, Tianhe-2, topped the list with a performance of 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second or Pflop/s.  That was nearly twice as fast as the next fastest system, which was Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oakridge, Tenn. Titan, which is the fastest system in the U.S., achieved 17.59 petaflop/s on the benchmark.

In addition to having the fastest system in the world, China nearly tripled the number of systems it has to 109 from 37 on the most recent list. At the same time, the number of systems in the U.S. has dropped to the lowest level since the TOP500 list was created 22 years ago.

There are now only 200 systems in the U.S., down sharply from 231 just four months ago. China now has more systems than Europe, which now counts 108 systems, compared to 141 on the July list.

China is also claiming a bigger share as a manufacturer of high performance computers with multiple Chinese computer makers becoming more active in the field. China's Lenovo is now counted among the vendors of systems on the TOP500 list. After its acquisition of IBM's x86 business last year, Lenovo now has 25 systems in list, compared to only three systems on the July 2015 list.

TagsChina’s Tianhe-2 Retains Title of World’s Fastest Supercomputer, the world’s fastest supercomputer, sixth consecutive year, Chinatopix, Tianhe-2, Milky Way 2, China’s National University of Defense Technology, the Top500 Project, Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Intel Xeon Phi processors