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For more than two decades, the TOP500 list has enjoyed incredible success as a metric for supercomputing performance and as a source of data for identifying technological trends. The project's editors reflect on its usefulness and limitations for guiding large-scale scientific computing into the exascale era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 supercomputers from China whose performance and supercomputing capacity is said to have overtaken the lead rank of the U.S. in 2016. Data presented compares the supercomputing capacity rankings of China and the U.S. from 2000 to 2016. It also discusses efforts of the Chinese government to support advances in life sciences and manufacturing design via supercomputing.

The article focuses on the need to have a global mechanism for planning and coordinating technologies necessary for working on the high performance computing (HPC) systems, across the open-source community. International Exascale Software Project (IESP) is stated to work across the community to identify critical lacunae in the overall software environment and spot opportunities for beneficial integration into the HPC. Also discussed in the article are the benefits of the project.