Visualizing the Power of the World’s Supercomputers
Visualizing the Power of the World’s Supercomputers
A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel.
A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is flops, or floating point operations per second.
In this visualization, we’ve used November 2021 data from TOP500 to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison.
Ranking by Teraflops
Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used teraflops as our comparison metric.
1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops.
| Rank | Name | Type | Teraflops |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 |  Supercomputer Fugaku | Supercomputer | 537,212 |
| #2 |  Summit | Supercomputer | 200,795 |
| #3 | Sierra | Supercomputer | 125,712 |
| #4 |  Sunway Taihulight | Supercomputer | 125,436 |
| #5 | Perlmutter | Supercomputer | 93,750 |
| n/a | Nvidia Titan RTX | Consumer device | 130 |
| n/a | Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 | Consumer device | 36 |
| n/a | Xbox Series X | Consumer device | 12 |
| n/a | Tesla Model S (2021) | Consumer device | 10 |
Supercomputer Fugaku was completed in March 2021, and is officially the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It’s used for various applications, including weather simulations and innovative drug discovery.
Sunway Taihulight is officially China’s top supercomputer and fourth most powerful in the world. That said, some experts believe that the country is already operating two much more powerful systems, based on data from anonymous sources.