Incremental Progress for China’s Commercial Quantum Computing Sector

At SC17 in Denver, the Japanese RIKEN K computer emerged for the third straight time as the world's most powerful supercomputer based on the High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark list. Although China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer has been widely seen as number one in the world based on its LINPAC rating, the HPCG test that the K computer excelled on may be more representative of the range of real-world HPC problems encounter by users. Riken's K computer has been either number one or two since the HPCG list came out in 2014.

Major government buyers we interviewed consistently named Cray as one of the handful of global supercomputer makers capable of true innovation at the system architecture level. These vendors maintain their ability to stay at the forefront of the HPC market by continually reinventing themselves and their products. Cray's capture of the $600 million CORAL 2 contract to deliver the 1.5-exaflops Frontier supercomputer to ORNL in 2021 is the company's latest demonstration of its ability to mutate in response to the evolving HPC market environment.