A few days ago we told you how Marenostrum 5, the new supercomputer that will be installed in the Supercomputing Center of Barcelona , wants to become a spearhead for the new technological development of the European Union.

In this regard and as reported by community sources, MareNostrum 5 will be 10,000 times more powerful than the original version of the same name, will cost 223 million euros and will be officially launched on December 31, 2020 if the phases of this large supercomputing project.

At full capacity, it is expected that the new European development will be able to deliver more than 200 petaflops , which would now make it the most powerful supercomputer in the world and by far the most powerful in Europe.

But while this happens (because probably by 2020, other facilities have exceeded European development) it is worth remembering which large supercomputers occupy the top ten list. As we will see below, the United States occupies five of the ten positions in this ranking, China and Europe manage to position two major teams and Japan manages to strain an installation.

10. Sequoia

This supercomputer installed in the US Department of Energy was considered the most powerful in the world in 2012 and since then, it has always positioned itself in the top ten.

Sequoia is based on the IBM / Q infrastructure and can deliver 17.17 petaflops using 1,572 cores and in overclocking it can increase its yield to 20.13 petaflops.

9. Titan

Titan was at the time of its presentation, the largest supercomputer installed in the United States and at the moment, continues to occupy the number nine internationally.

Installed in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and dependent on the US Department of Energy, it is built on the Cray XK7 infrastructure . It manages to deliver up to 17.6 petaflops on average using NVIDIA K20x GPUs.

8. SuperMUC-NG

In number 8 of this special ranking we find the first supercomputer that is on European soil. We speak in this case of the SuperMUG-NG a real “beast” of computing that is installed in the Leibniz Supercomputing Center , which Lenovo manages in this German city.

The SuperMUC-NG is the world’s largest supercomputer based on x86 architecture, using Intel Xeon Scalable Skylake processors. It includes no less than 311,040 cores and its yield can reach up to 19.5 petaflops.

7. AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI)

Installed at the National Institute of Technology and Advanced Industrial Science of Japan, ABCI is a supercomputer developed by Fujitsu using Primergy CX2550 servers equipped with Intel Xeon Gold processors and Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs.

Designed to be very energy efficient , it is capable of delivering 19.9 petflops, with a ratio of 12.05 gigaflops / watt.

6. Trinity

With Trinity we overcome the barrier of 20 petaflops (in this case, 20.2). Based on the Cray XC40 architecture, it has the peculiarity of being the only one on this list that has Intel Xeon Phi processors. Like many of those that have been installed in the United States in recent years, it depends directly on their energy department (in this case at their Los Alamos facilities).

Triniy is also one of those who have been updated in recent times, moving from the number nine position with which he debuted a few years ago, to the current number six position.

5. Piz Daint

The second European supercomputer is found in Lugano, Switzerland. Piz Daint debuted in the 2012 to 500 list in a somewhat lagging position, 114.

Since then it has only improved. Installed in which Swiss National Supercomputing Center, it has taken less than a decade to become the most powerful computer of those found in the old continent , offering a computing capacity of 21.2 petaflops.

4. Tianhe-2A

The Chinese presence in this ranking begins with the Tianhe-2A, a supercomputer located in the National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou. The equipment is governed by Intel Xeon E5-2692v2 and Matrix-2000 processors, reaching five million cores .

As for its performance, with the Tianhe-2A we start talking about major words: 61.4 petaflops and an energy efficiency of 3,325 gigaflops / watt.

3. Sunway TaihuLight

The second great Chinese computer of this ranking came to occupy the world number 1 a few years ago, but in recent months it has lost two positions. Installed at the Wuxi National Super Computer Center, it is capable of delivering 93 petaflops virtually effortlessly.

One of its differential characteristics is that it does not use acceleration chips, relying on its entire processing capacity in 40,960 Sunway 26010 processors , each with 260 cores.

2. Sierra

Once again, the US Department of Energy once again stars in this list. It does it with two large facilities: Sierra and Summit.

In the case of Sierra, we talk about a supercomputer that is in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and in the last year, it has been able to go from 71.6 petaflops to 96.6 petaflops , getting by the hairs to overcome the past June, to the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight.

It has 1,572,480 cores in its IBM Power9 processors, which in turn are powered by Nvidia GV100 GPUs.

1. Summit

He was the last to arrive, but it has not taken long to get ahead of the ranking of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Installed in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it has happened in a few months to offer a performance of 122.3 petaflops to overcome the 143.5 petaflops barrier .

As in the case of Sierra, Summit relied on IBM Power9 processors and Nvidia GV100 GPUs. The difference? Many more cores.

In this case, Summit offers scientists no less than 2,282,544. But there is more. Those who have the opportunity to use it daily ensure that the facility has enough potential to reach the threshold of 187 petaflops.