The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy released on November 16 the latest list of top 500 supercomputers in the world. The DeepComp 6800 developed by the Legend Group Corp. with a sustained performance of 4.183 trillion floating point operations per second (TFlops) for the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) ranked the 14th, an ever-highest for China-made supercomputer in the list.

The ranking of DeepComp 6800 is quite outstanding in the list since those ahead of it are all made by the United States and Japan. Among the top 500 supercomputers, there are another two Legend-made computers, both of which DeepComp 1800 serial products, ranking the 82nd and 188th respectively. In the top 500 list released in November last year, a DeepComp 1800 achieving 1.046 TFlops ranked 43rd.

The Earth Simulator built by NEC Corp. for Japan's Eearth Simulation Center remained unchallenged at 35.86 TFlops followed by the supercomputer developed by the US Hewlett-Packard for the Los Alamos National Laboratory at 13.88 TFlops. What is especially notable is a supercomputer rated at 10.28 TFlops developed by the students and faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

The United States remains number one in the field of supercomputer as 90 percent of the top 500 supercomputers are made by US companies or universities.

(People's Daily November 19, 2003)