The international race of top supercomputers and its implications

Computational simulation and modeling has become the third leg of science and engineering, alongside with theory and experimentation. Supercomputers are at the forefront of it. The nation that has leading high-performance computing capacity will have enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of areas, and there is tentative evidence that countries’ growth in high-tech output is associated with their growth in supercomputing capacity. The United States has been the dominating nation in terms of supercomputing capacity ever since computer scientists started to collect data on supercomputers globally and systemically. However, China has emerged in the last decade, literally from nowhere, to become the second largest player in supercomputing. The Chinese state has poured in large amounts of resources into developing the fastest supercomputer on earth, directly challenging the United States’ supremacy in this field