The world's fastest supercomputer remains Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier system in Tennessee, ranking No. 1 in the semiannual list of the 500 most powerful systems. However, it is no longer the only exascale machine on the list, with the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility's Aurora system in Illinois taking the No. 2 spot and becoming the second-ever to break the computing barrier.
Both the Frontier and Aurora supercomputers are supported by the Department of Energy and can measure over a quintillion calculations per second, reaching the threshold for exascale computing (see 101). Among other applications, the massive computing power of both Frontier and Aurora are expected to help uncover insights into complex systems, including climate, artificial intelligence, and molecular-level medicine. The computing power is believed to be comparable to that of the human brain.
The US accounts for roughly one-third of the top 500 supercomputers, including the fastest cloud system, Eagle, which runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud. China accounts for 16% of the list.
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