Researchers Employ Parallelism to Improve Quantum Annealing Performance

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.

Taiwan-based TSMC, the world's largest chip foundry, recently announced (https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332869) that high performance computing (HPC) has supplanted smart phones as the most important driver of its business, although presumably not yet the largest financially.