MORRISVILLE – A strong year in sales has further tightened Lenovo’s grip on the world’s No. 1 ranking as supercomputer builder – and a great deal of that work continues to be done in the Triangle.

The latest Top 500 supercomputer list shows Lenovo is tops in supercomputers with 173 systems. That’s 56 more than a year ago when Lenovo seized the top spot for the first time. Combined, the Lenovo supercomputers account for nearly 35 percent of the world’s capacity.

Lenovo, which operates dual headquarters in Beijing and Morrisville, also is No. 1 or No. 2 in worldwide PC sales depending on what statistics are used.

The tech conglomerate’s supercomputer lab and much of the research for related technology, including artificial intelligence, is based in the Triangle where its Data Center Group is headquartered.

Lenovo has one supercomputer in the top 10 ranking of individual systems – the SuperMUC-NG machine at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre which comes in at No. 9 spot with  the power and capacity to calculate information at a top speed of 19.5 petaflops.

According to Webopedia, “a petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Additionally, a petaflop can be measured as one thousand teraflops. A petaflop computer requires a massive number of computers working in parallel on the same problem.”

And Lenovo’s dominance is growing as overall supercomputing power is increasing. The Top 500 list notes that this latest publication is the first in which all 500 systems operate at one petaflop or faster.

China represents a big market for Lenovo with 74 Lenovo-based systems operating in that country.

Lenovo’s rise in supercomputers has been quick.

“In June 2014, Lenovo had zero listings on the TOP500 and we brought over a small handful of listings (less than 10) with the IBM acquisition,” a Lenovo executive told WRAL TechWire in 2018.

“The other 100+ have been organically won and installed systems by Lenovo.”

Lenovo’s supercomputer business in built around the IBM x86 server group it acquired in 2014.