About a year ago we talked about the virtues of TaihuLight, the Chinese supercomputer with more than ten million cores that holds the first place on the TOP500 list. The "red 1-2" between TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 remains intact for the 2017 update, but there is a very important modification: the American Titan is ceding the third place to the optimized version of the Swiss Piz Daint. The last time the United States did not reach the podium of the TOP500 list was in 1996, however, there is something on the horizon that could take it straight to the top.
The phrase says that "if there is no news, it is because it is good news", but everything depends on the context. In the case of technological evolution, a drought of novelties can be a symptom of stagnation, and at the end of the day nobody wants that. If we study closely the situation of supercomputers, the TOP500 list tells us the same story as last year: TaihuLight with its 93 petaFLOPS has massacred everything in its path, while Tianhe-2 appears much further down with 33 petaFLOPS. Of course, China has every reason to celebrate its current dominance, but this race needs at least two participants, and in the United States, performance continues to decline.
The June update published by the official TOP500 page confirms that the improved version of the Swiss Piz Daint displaced the Titan of the Department of Energy with an effective advantage of two teraFLOPS (19.5 against 17.5). The last time American hardware was absent from the Top 3 was in 1996, an era marked by the impressive performance of Japanese supercomputers. That country still has two systems in the top ten, the Oakforest-PACS and the K Computer, but they pale in comparison to the numbers of the Chinese developments.
Sequoia, Cori, Mira, and Trinity complete the group of five supercomputers that the United States maintains in the Top 10, but even if we combine the performance of all of them, it is not enough to displace TaihuLight. All the chips seem to be placed on the Summit project, officially presented as the replacement for Titan. It is estimated that Summit will reach 150 petaFLOPS with a consumption of ten megawatts, and if it succeeds, it will be the automatic number 1. At the same time, we must not forget that China already works on an exaFLOP system. The climate is calm today, but within a few months a real revolution could break out among supercomputers.
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