America to the rest of the world:

The three fastest supercomputers in the world are all currently located in the US, according to new rankings published this week by Top500.

At the top of the list is the Frontier, a supercomputer built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in Tennessee, which can perform just under 1.2 million trillion calculations/second (here’s that number written out: 1,200,000,000,000,000,000).

• Frontier is more than twice as fast as the second-ranked supercomputer, the Department of Energy’s new Aurora system in Illinois. However, Aurora is currently operating at around one-quarter of its full capacity, and is expected to overtake Frontier with 2+ million trillion calculations/second by next year.
• The third spot is occupied by another new supercomputer, called Eagle, which is also operated by the Department of Energy. It contains 1.12 million high-end computing cores, including Nvidia’s H100 GPU and Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8480C, which both retail for $10,000+ a pop.

📸 Big picture: China and the US have dominated the biannual Top 500 rankings for decades, but America is channeling Lightning McQueen near the finish line and starting to pull ahead. The US has 161 supercomputers on the most recent list, up from 150 last year, while China dropped from 134 to 104 over the same period.