Worlds's Fastest Five Super computers

1. Summit

Summit is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where it aids in research into subjects like material science, cancer, and fusion energy for the US Department of Energy (DoE).

This is the second time the TOP500 list has been topped by Summit, which in June this year became the first US-based supercomputer to head the list since 2012.

The machine has 4,356 nodes, each equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs. Its nodes are linked using a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.

Processor cores: 2,397,824

Max performance (Linpack benchmark): 143.5PFlop/s

Memory: 2.8PB

Power consumption: 9,783kW

2. Sierra

Sierra received a hardware overhaul recently, giving it some new capabilities that pushed it from number three up a place to the second place spot.

Tasked with the crucial role of simulating tests of nuclear weapons in the US stockpile, this new machine is based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The supercomputer relies on a mix of IBM Power9 CPUs and Nvidia Volta GPUs and is significantly more capable than the lab's existing Sequoia supercomputer, with Sierra able to sustain four-to-six times the performance and five-to-seven times the workload of the older machine.

Processor cores: 1,572,480

Max performance (Linpack benchmark): 94,640TFlop/s

Memory: 1.4PB

3. Sunway TaihuLight

The former number one machine, the Sunway TaihuLight once set the standard for supercomputing speed but has since slipped to number three.

Based in the National Supercomputing Center in the city of Wuxi, the Chinese system performs calculations to aid research and engineering work, ranging from climate modelling to advanced manufacturing.

Unlike most other supercomputers, the TaihuLight doesn't rely on Intel CPUs but instead utilises a custom ShenWei processor, a RISC CPU with 260 cores, and custom interconnects made in Wuxi.

Processor cores: 10,649,600

Max performance (Linpack benchmark): 93PFLOPS - quadrillion floating point operations per second

Memory: 1.3PB

Power consumption: 15,371kW

4. Tianhe-2

Tianhe-2, capable of more than 33 quadrillion calculations per second, holds steady in the number four spot, where it sat in the June list as well.

Otherwise known as the Milky Way 2, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer memory is based in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China.

The machine is capable of carrying out a massive number of operations in parallel, spreading tasks between its millions of cores. Each of the machine's nodes has two Intel Xeon E5 Ivy Bridge processors and custom-built Matrix-2000 coprocessors.

Processor cores: 4,981,760

Max performance (Linpack benchmark): 61.4PFLOPS - quadrillion floating point operations per second

Memory: 2.3PB

Power consumption: 18,482kW

5. Piz Daint

The fastest system in Europe and number five machine in the world is Piz Daint, based at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.

A recent upgrade to the Cray XC50 research machine doubled its performance, with Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs added to its cluster of 2.2GHz Intel Xeon E5-2692 CPUs.

The Piz Daint has come a long way, entering the TOP500 supercomputer list at number 114 in 2012, but steadily climbing thanks to repeated upgrades.

Processor cores: 387,872

Max performance (Linpack benchmark): 21.2PFLOPS - quadrillion floating point operations per second

Memory: 365,056GB

Power consumption: 2384.24kW