China still has the world’s fastest supercomputer,Tianhe-2

There is a prime race for nations to expand their supercomputing power, As of now, China holds a significant lead by being home to the two fastest supercomputers,Switzerland comes in second and the United states comes in fourth with its Titan machine.

Tianhe-2 (One of China’s supercomputers),has nearly doubled its previous power as announced by head of Matsuoka Lab, Satoshi Matsuoka. The upgraded computer now performs at a staggering 94.97 petaflops, compared to its previous peak performance of 54.9 petaflops.

1. a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (10¹⁵) floating-point operations per second.

The upgrade came from replacing  Intel's, Knights Corner Xeon Phi coprocessors chips installed in 2013 and replacing them with their domestic chips.The original plan was to upgrade the system with new Intel chips. Unfortunately, the United States issued an embargo blocking the export of these chips to specific supercomputing sites, including that of China. In response, China was forced to begin building their own chips.