Accelerated systems, or GPU-powered systems, for the first time accounted for more than 100 on the list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers. That’s a total of 143 petaflops, over one-third of the list’s total FLOPS.

NVIDIA Tesla GPU-based supercomputers comprise 70 of these systems – including 23 of the 24 new systems on the list – reflecting compound annual growth of nearly 50 percent over the past five years.

There are three primary reasons accelerators are becoming increasingly adopted for high performance computing.

1. Moore’s Law continues to slow, forcing the industry to find new ways to deliver computational power more efficiently.
2. Hundreds of applications – including the vast majority of those most commonly used – are now GPU accelerated.
3. Even modest investments in accelerators can now result in significant increases in throughput, maximising efficiency for supercomputing sites and hyperscale datacentres.