(Yicai Global) June 26 -- The US supercomputer Summit beat China's Sunway TaihuLight to rank first in the latest global top 500 supercomputer list. The US recoups this acme position after losing it to China a few years ago. Sunway TaihuLight has topped this list (released semiannually) on the last four occasions.

Summit is a supercomputer developed by the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the eastern state of Tennessee. It can perform 122.3 petaflops, nearly 187.7 petaflops at a peak, compared to Sunway TaihuLight's 93 petaflops, the list released on June 25 shows, as state Xinhua News Agency reported. One petaflop is 1 billion calculations per second.

Summit, with 4,608 servers and 10 petabytes of memory, takes up two tennis courts, the UK's Daily Mail reported. 

Sierra from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), China's Tianhe-2 and Japan's AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure all trailed, coming in at third, fourth and fifth, respectively.

China holds the lead in total number of supercomputers on the list, with a rise from to 206 from 202 in November, while America slid to 124 from 144. China's tech giant Lenovo Group ranks first among manufacturers in that it provides technical support to 119 listed supercomputers.

Intel dominates the field of supercomputer processors as 476 of the computers in the running -- over 95 percent -- use its chips.

These installations find wide use in industry and in national security tasks like developing nuclear weapons. Summit also presages the creation of 'exascale' computers able to perform one billion-billion calculations per second, which are expected to emerge in the early 2020s, MIT Technology Review reported.

Intel dominates the field of supercomputer processors as 476 of the computers in the running -- over 95 percent -- use its chips.

Editor: Ben Armour