The TOP500 world ranking of the world’s most powerful computer systems is based on “Linpack, which means that systems are ranked only by their ability to solve a set of linear equations, A x = b, using a dense random matrix A.”  Rankings are compiled by four experts from NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, and Prometus GmbH, a German high-tech company, and are published every six months.

The current list of supercomputers is headed by the Frontier system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA, and the leading academic system is Leonardo at Atos Euro HPC/CINECA, Italy.

The United States is now leading in the number of systems in the top 500, with 150 systems compared with 126 on the previous list published six months ago, while that of China has fallen from 162 to 134. It is not clear whether the apparent Chinese decline is a reflection of the data collection process.

The current top five countries are USA, China, Germany, Japan, and France.  Brazil is represented by nine systems, Russia by seven, Saudi Arabia by six and Africa by one, Toubkal at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University – African Supercomputing Centre in Morocco.