South Korea's Latest Supercomputer Already Drops in Ranking... China Surpasses US in Number Owned

SC21 Announces Supercomputer Ranking Top 500

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] As the global competition for ultra-high-performance computing intensifies, the performance rankings of recently introduced supercomputers in South Korea have already begun to decline.

According to the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) on the 17th, the Top500 supercomputer rankings reflecting this were announced on the 15th at the Supercomputing Conference (SC 21) held over six days starting from the 14th in St. Louis, USA.

Fugaku, jointly developed by Japan's RIKEN and Fujitsu, maintained its number one position for two consecutive years since June last year. Fugaku's measured performance is 442 petaflops (PF), capable of performing 4.42 x 10^16 calculations per second. The second place went to Summit at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the United States, followed by Sierra at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in third place. Except for the newly entered Voyager-EUS2 at 10th place, there were almost no changes.

South Korea holds a total of seven supercomputers, ranking 9th in the number of units by country. However, except for SSC-21 from Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, which newly entered the overall 11th place this year, rankings have declined. The Korea Meteorological Administration's GURU dropped three places to 27th, and MARU fell five places to 28th. KISTI's 5th supercomputer, Nurion, also dropped seven places from its ranking in the first half of this year to 38th. Nurion has a computing speed of 25.7 petaflops (PF) and 8,437 compute nodes. One petaflop (PF) corresponds to one quadrillion calculations per second, and Nurion can complete calculations that would take 7 billion people 420 years in just one hour.

By country, in terms of performance within the Top500 rankings, the United States accounted for 32.5%, Japan 20.7%, and China 17.5%, together making up 70.7% of the total. In terms of quantity, China recorded 173 units (34.6%), the United States 149 units (29.8%), and Japan 32 units (6.4%).

Lee Sik, head of KISTI's National Supercomputing Center, stated, "Since exascale systems from advanced supercomputing countries are expected to emerge next year, there were no significant changes in the top rankings at SC 21." He added, "It is encouraging that domestic large companies like Samsung have begun to actively invest in supercomputing infrastructure as the demand for computing resources for artificial intelligence and big data analysis grows."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.