China's Tianhe-2, or Milky Way-2, retained its fifth consecutive crown as the world's most powerful supercomputer, according to the 45th edition of the biannual Top 500 list released by TOP500.org. TOP500.org is an international organization tracking supercomputers around the globe.

Tianhe-2, which was developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, has a performance of 33.86 petaflops per second on the Linpack benchmark, the same as that in June 2013 when it first hit the top spot. The supercomputer's one-hour computing capacity is equivalent to that of 1.3 billion people simultaneously calculating on their calculators for 1,000 years.

Titan, the fastest system in the United States, stood out as No.2 on the list. The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory uses the system that runs at 17.59 petaflops per second.

Shaheen II, a Cray XC40 system at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, is the only new face in the Top 10 list. The system came in at the 7th place with a maximum calculation capacity of 5.536 petaflops per second.

The list indicates a slowing trend in performance growth over the past two years. Nevertheless, the combined performance of the Top 500 systems reached 363 petaflops per second, compared to 309 petaflops per second in November 2014 and 274 petaflops per second in June 2014.

The United States and Europe respectively had 233 and 141 systems included in the Top 500 list. The number of Chinese systems slipped to 37 from 61 in November 2014.

Following are the top ten most powerful supercomputers in the world:

   Vulcan（羅神）

Site: DOE/NNSA/LLNL, United States

Manufacturer: IBM

Cores: 393,216

Linpack Performance (Rmax): 4,293.31 TFlop/s

Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 5,033.16 TFlop/s

Power: 1,972.00 kW

Memory: 393,216 GB

Processor: Power BQC 16C 1.6GHz

Interconnect: Custom Interconnect

Operating System: Linux

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