China's two supercomputers still world's fastest as US squeezed out of 3rd place

"Although the US dropped out of the top three, it still has strong strength in high performance computing," Fu told Xinhua. "If everything goes well, we could see two US systems with a performance of 200 to 300 petaflops in the next rankings at the end of the year."

Just days before the TOP500 announcement, the US Department of Energy said it has awarded AMD, Cray, HP Enterprise, IBM, Intel and NVIDIA a total of 258 million US dollars in funding to accelerate the development of next-generation supercomputers.

"Continued US leadership in high performance computing is essential to our security, prosperity, and economic competitiveness as a nation," US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said in a recent statement.

The immediate goal of the United States is to develop at least one exascale-capable system by 2021, which will be at least 10 times faster than China's Sunway TaihuLight.

"Global competition for this technological dominance is fierce," the US Department of Energy asserted. "However, the US retains global leadership in the actual application of high performance computing to national security, industry, and science."

In addition, the latest list showed that the United States leads the pack in the total number of TOP500 systems, with 169, while China is a close second with 160. Both countries lost share compared to six months ago, when they each claimed 171 systems.

Besides the United States and China, the most well-represented countries on the list are Japan, with 33 supercomputers, Germany, with 28, France, with 18, and Britain, with 17.