US QC Supplier Rigetti’s Recent Realignment: Positing Its Larger Implications

DOE's recent announcement of the operational Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) marks a shift in the global lead for supercomputer performance from China back to the United States.

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.