Geek Heaven: China Outperforms US in Top500 List of Supercomputers Worldwide

China tops the list of countries with the best performing supercomputers worldwide, the web resource Top500 wrote on Monday.

As reported by the website, one year ago, the US was a leader in this field, possessing 200 supercomputers compared with 108 in China.

Now, China and the US are competing with each other for supercomputer supremacy. Each of them has 171 supercomputers followed by Germany (31), Japan (27), France (20) and the UK (13).

At the same time, the website noted that "China has maintained its dominance at the top of the list with the same number 1 and 2 systems from six months ago: Sunway TaihuLight, at 93 petaflops, and Tianhe-2, at 34 petaflops." It means that no American-made supercomputer can quite compete with the Chinese one.

China demonstrated a new record-breaking capacity supercomputer, made exclusively from Chinese-built microprocessors, in summer 2016. The new supercomputer system called Sunway TaihuLight can perform up to 124.5 petaflops, and is the first system to surpass 100 petaflops.

China's efforts in developing its own processors stems from Washington's decision to block Beijing's access to Intel's processors last February. This was based on an unfounded fear that the Chinese government would use the technology to develop nuclear weapons.