Most Powerful Supercomputers on the World

Tianhe-2

This is the fifth consecutive time that Tianhe-2, also known as Milky Way-2, has topped the list. Housed in National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, this 33.86-petaflop/s machine was developed by a 1,300-member strong team. The supercomputer, which costs approximately $390 million, is used for simulation, analysis, and government security applications by the Chinese.

Titan

With a theoretical peak of 27 petaflops per second, Titan is the most powerful supercomputer in the US. Located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this machine is used in fields of materials science, fuel combustion, chemistry simulations and meteorology. The super-device, built by Cray, has consistently ranked behind Tianhe-2 at #2 for four consecutive years and costs around $97 million.

Sequoia

Built primarily for nuclear weapons simulation, IBM’s Sequoia became the first supercomputer to use more than a million computing cores at a time for a single application in January 2013. Developed by IBM and located at Lawrence Livermore National Library, California, this machine has a Linpack performance for 17.17 petaflops per second.

K Computer

Developed by Fujitsu, the K Computer has a Linpack performance of 10.5 petaflops per second. The K Computer, which is located at RIKEN, Japan, is used for various applications such as climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. In June 2011, K Computer had topped this list of powerful supercomputers.

Mira

The third most powerful supercomputer in the US, Mira, is also one of the most energy efficient supercomputer in the world. Developed by IBM and located at Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, the machine is mostly used for climatology, seismology and computational chemistry.

Piz Daint

Named after an Alpine peak, Piz Daint is located at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center. With a Linpack performance of 6.2 petaflops per second, it is used for high performance computing research, as a computing resource for national and international projects, and even as a meteorology platform for MeteoSwiss.

Shaheen II

This supercomputer from the Middle East is located at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. This is the first time that this machine has featured in this list. The Cray XC40 computer is used in fields such as energy, environment, bioengineering, and applied mathematics.