What Is a Supercomputer? | The Supercomputing Series
A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the highest operational rate for computers. Traditionally, supercomputers have been used for scientific and engineering applications that must handle massive databases, do a great amount of computation or both. Advances like multicore processors and general-purpose graphics processing units have enabled powerful machines that could be called desktop supercomputers or GPU supercomputers.
Year Supercomputer Peak speed (Rmax) Location
2021 Sunway Oceanlite 1.05 exaFLOPS (unofficial) Qingdao, China
2021 Fujitsu Fugaku 442 PFLOPS Kobe, Japan
2018 IBM Summit 148.6 PFLOPS Oak Ridge, Tenn.
2018 IBM Sierra 94.6 PFLOPS Livermore, Calif.
2016 Sunway TaihuLight 93.01 PFLOPS Wuxi, China
2013 NUDT Tianhe-2 33.86 PFLOPS Guangzhou, China
2012 Cray Titan 17.59 PFLOPS Oak Ridge, Tenn.
2012 IBM Sequoia 17.17 PFLOPS Livermore, Calif.
2011 Fujitsu K computer 10.51 PFLOPS Kobe, Japan
2010 NUDT Tianhe-1A 2.566 PFLOPS Tianjin, China
2009 Cray Jaguar 1.759 PFLOPS Oak Ridge, Tenn.
2008 IBM Roadrunner 1.105 PFLOPS Los Alamos, N.M.
