(Yicai Global) June 18 -- China's 219 supercomputers on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful processors rank it higher than any other country for the fourth half-year in a row.

China has led the list since November 17, state-backed news agency Xinhua reported yesterday, when the Top500 project published the rankings at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt. Top500 began tracking the world's most powerful supercomputers in 1993 and has been releasing the biannual list ever since.

Lenovo was the biggest supercomputer manufacturer with 173, according to Top500's data, while compatriots Inspur and Sugon had 71 and 63 -- ranking them second and third worldwide.

The United States ranked second among countries with 116. Hewlett-Packard made 40 of those and Cray made 39, with the two American brands filling out the top five manufacturers.

Japan, France and the United Kingdom were the next three biggest producers by location, while the top four supercomputers retained their ranking from the previous issue. China's TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 were third and fourth but US-based Summit and Sierra claimed the top spots.

All computers on the list now have a floating-point speed of at least one petaflop (a quadtrillion floating-point operations per second), with the slowest processor graded at 1.02 petaflops and the fastest at 148.6.

Editor: James Boynton