The United States has been being pushed down in the TOP500 standings for some time courtesy China, whom has taken the 1st and 2nd place seats from the US with their Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 Supercomputers (at a Linpack performance of 93 and 33.9 Petaflops, respectively). It seemed though the crown was stolen from America, 3rd place was relatively safe for the former champs. Not so. America has been pushed right off the podium in the latest TOP500 refresh... not by China though, but Switzerland?No, it wasn't my first guess either. Aparently the land of high mountains and hidden inaccessible bank accounts (if you subscribe to stereotypes, anyways) has taken 3rd place with an upgrade to its "Piz Daint" Cray XC50-based Supercomputer which now ranks at 19.6 Petaflops, pushing the United State's Department Of Energy's "Titan" system down to a measly 4th place, at 17.6 Petaflops. It is worth noting that this is the same rate at which the Titan ran at when it was installed in 2012, meaning the system has never been upgraded in a way that would net it more performance.

The upgrade to Piz Daint (which enabled it to leapfrog 5 entries to the number 3 position, by the way) came in the form of a GPU-package from NVIDIA. Piz Daint had its Tesla K20X GPU's swapped for a new set of Tesla P100's, making it not only the #3 supercomputer in the world, but the fastest GPU-based supercomputer in the entire world.

So yes, while the swiss have drawn blood, America is far from underrepresented in the TOP500. To the red-white-and-blue's credit, the U.S.A. supplies the vast majority of hardware powering the systems in the TOP500 listings. Intel based solutions power 464 out of the TOP500's well, 500. IBM's POWER based systems power an additional 21 Systems, and AMD has its Opteron line present in 6 systems. That means the US stills supplies the actual parts to build 491/500 of the supercomputer solutions in the TOP500. If you want to talk about the raw power available across all those systems, I think it's safe to say they clobber China quite readily at least in manufactured muscle, to their credit.

Still, it is clear that not all is well in the US of A's standings. This is the first time they have not secured one of the top 3 places in the TOP500 since a small blip in 1996 where Japan briefly stole all three seats (and briefly, mind you).

Something will likely need to change if the USA wants to maintain its dominance long-term.