The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo by ORNL/U.S. Department of Energy)

China has passed the United States in the total number of top ranked supercomputers, and Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has dropped from fourth to fifth on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

The TOP500 list is released twice a year, once in June and once in November. It is based on a benchmark test known as Linpack.

Titan at ORNL dropped from third to fourth in June, bumped from the number three spot by the upgraded Piz Daint, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Titan is capable of 17.59 petaflops. A petaflop is one quadrillion calculations per second. That’s 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Piz Daint is capable of 19.59 petaflops.

That power is useful in scientific research. At ORNL, Titan is used for research in areas such as materials science, nuclear energy, combustion, and climate science. ORNL is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory.

Titan slipped one more spot in this month’s list, from fourth to fifth. It was displaced by the upgraded Gyoukou supercomputer. That is a ZettaScaler-2.2 system capable of 19.14 petaflops and deployed at Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the home of the Earth Simulator. [Read more…]