By Wang Shen
Among the top 500 supercomputers in the world, China designed 206 while the US owned 124 of them respectively, as reported by the Yicai Media Group on Wednesday.
According to a top 500 list of supercomputers, at present, the top five supercomputer manufacturers are Lenovo, Hewlett Packard (HP), Inspur, Cray and Sugon, of which three come from China and two from the US.
The market share of the top five manufacturers was 23.8 percent, 15.8 percent, 13.6 percent, 11.2 percent and 11 percent, respectively.
A supercomputer is a computer with a high-level performance compared to a general-purpose computer. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, and oil and gas exploration.
However, Zhao Yanbin, a computer science professor from the University of Chicago, said that supercomputers are commonly used as a way for large countries to show their ability and power in technology. The tasks that the supercomputers can complete now depend on data centers, whose speed is faster than supercomputers.
Although a supercomputer is not a widely-used technology, it will help researchers to stimulate and predict what may happen in the real world. At present, half of the world's top 500 supercomputers are used for enterprise projects. The supercomputer will be applied to more fields, such as pharmaceuticals, new materials and energy technologies.
Richard Suttmeier, an expert in Chinese science policy from the University of Oregon, pointed out that high performance computing provided a blueprint for fields, including artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing in China.
According to the data from Hyperion Research, a premier source of independent market research and advisory services, the global supercomputer market will reach US $9.5 billion by the end of 2020. The Hyperion Research defined supercomputers as computers worth over $500,000.
