There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops, according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers. It is the first system to exceed 100 petaflops. A petaflop equals one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second.

China has done it again — except this time with a brand new supercomputer. The Sunway TaihuLight is now the fastest system in the world, according to the twice-per-year TOP500 list, with a stunning Linpack benchmark result of 93 petaflops. That makes it three times faster than the prior champion, China’s Tianhe-2, which we’ve covered numerous times on ExtremeTech and had sat on top of the list since it first went online in 2013.