High-performance computing

Supercomputers and the software that runs science on them.

The United States leads high-performance computing research, with 36.3% of the 10% most cited papers published 2021–2025; China is second with 13.9%.

This field publishes its leading work largely at conferences, so this technology counts journal articles, conference papers and preprints from any source, not only core journals. A paper posted as a preprint and later published can appear twice.

FirstUnited States36.3%

SecondChina13.9%

2.6×lead, by share of the 10% most cited papers, 2021–2025

Highlight a country

Standings

1USUnited States36.3%2CNChina13.9%3DEGermany7.5%4–5ITItaly4.4%4–5ESSpain4.3%6FRFrance3.3%7–8GBUnited Kingdom2.8%7–8CHSwitzerland2.8%9INIndia2.4%10BRBrazil2.0%

Share of the 10% most cited papers, 2021–2025; 269 papers. Source: OpenAlex, pulled 18 October 2026. Method

Year by year

About 54 papers a year. Single-year moves are noise.

United States

Everyone else, on a larger scale

Share of the 10% most cited papers published in each year. Source: OpenAlex, pulled 18 October 2026. Method

Inside the field

Always the top 10%Pilot

Each paper sorted into one sub-area by an AI model reading its title and abstract, then credited as usual. On 200 hand-labelled papers it chose the same sub-area, or a defensible second, 92% of the time.

Sub-area	Papers	First	Second	Third
Supercomputer systems, processors, GPUs and interconnects	59	USUnited States25.5%	CNChina24.2%	ITItaly6.5%
Programming models, performance portability and libraries	58	USUnited States52.1%	CNChina7.7%	CHSwitzerland5.6%
Scientific simulation codes at scale (molecular, fluids, climate)	52	USUnited States37.7%	DEGermany14.1%	CNChina13.5%
Workflows, data management and AI-HPC convergence	40	USUnited States49.8%	DEGermany9.8%	CNChina7.5%
Job scheduling, energy efficiency and resource management	36	CNChina22.3%	USUnited States16.6%	ESSpain8.9%

Share of each sub-area's papers in the top 10%. Source: OpenAlex, pulled 18 October 2026. Method

Earlier and recent

The same top 10%, split into 2021–2023 and 2024–2025.

FallingRising2021–20232024–2025Change

USUnited States 39.5%32.3%−7.2 pts

CNChina 12.1%16.1%+4.1 pts

DEGermany 6.6%8.6%+2.0 pts

ITItaly 2.9%6.4%+3.5 pts

ESSpain 4.4%4.3%−0.1 pts

FRFrance 3.4%3.2%−0.2 pts

GBUnited Kingdom 3.6%1.8%−1.8 pts

CHSwitzerland 3.5%1.8%−1.7 pts

Greyed rows rest on fewer than five papers of credit in one period.

Share of the 10% most cited papers: 150 papers in 2021–2023, 119 in 2024–2025. Source: OpenAlex, pulled 18 October 2026. Method

2026 so far: a different count

Not the most cited papers: every 2026 paper matched so far (769), and a paper counts in full for each country on it. This year's papers are too new to rank by citations, so these shares cannot be compared with the ones above.

USUnited States21.3%of 2026 papers have an author here
DEGermany14.4%of 2026 papers have an author here
CNChina9.8%of 2026 papers have an author here
ITItaly6.0%of 2026 papers have an author here
GBUnited Kingdom5.3%of 2026 papers have an author here

Who cites the top papers

How much more often a country's top papers are cited from home than its size predicts. Expected is the country's share of all papers in the field; the bar is the excess, in percentage points. Home citers include authors citing their own earlier work.

HomeExpectedExcess

USUnited States 50.1%27.6%+22.5

CNChina 62.9%13.3%+49.6

Based on up to 100 of each country's most cited single-country papers in the top 10%. Source: OpenAlex, pulled 18 October 2026. Method

Behind the share

Institutions with the most credit

1USArgonne National LaboratoryResearch facility3.8%
2USOak Ridge National LaboratoryResearch facility3.3%
3USLawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryResearch facility3.1%
4CNNational University of Defense Technology3.0%
5ESBarcelona Supercomputing CenterResearch facility2.0%
6USLos Alamos National LaboratoryResearch facility1.9%
7USSandia National LaboratoriesResearch facility1.6%
8USUniversity of Tennessee at Knoxville1.5%
9USLawrence Livermore National LaboratoryResearch facility1.5%
10DEPaderborn University1.5%

Share of the top 10%. Institutions across all 45 technologies

Who does the work

Sector	All	US	CN	DE
Universities	55.8%	35.5%	84.0%	48.0%
Research facilities	32.0%	50.8%	8.7%	49.9%
Companies	5.6%	11.8%	1.0%	0.5%
Government labs	3.0%	0.3%	5.3%	1.5%

Share of credit by type of institution, overall and for the three leading countries.

Across borders

38.3% of the top 10% have authors in more than one country.

DEUSGermany with United States18
FRUSFrance with United States9
DEFRGermany with France9
CHUSSwitzerland with United States8
DEESGermany with Spain8

Most frequent pairings, by number of shared papers.

The papers behind the numbers

The five most cited papers this definition catches. If one looks out of place, the definition needs work.

LAMMPS - a flexible simulation tool for particle-based materials modeling at the atomic, meso, and continuum scales
Computer Physics Communications, 2021DEUS
12,434citations
Kokkos 3: Programming Model Extensions for the Exascale Era
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2021CHUS
486citations
The digital revolution of Earth-system science
Nature Computational Science, 2021CHGB
247citations
The targets R package: a dynamic Make-like function-oriented pipeline toolkit for reproducibility and high-performance computing
The Journal of Open Source Software, 2021US
238citations
JURECA: Data Centric and Booster Modules implementing the Modular Supercomputing Architecture at Jülich Supercomputing Centre
Journal of large-scale research facilities JLSRF, 2021
231citations

More in computing and ai

The most technologically advanced countries, and is China ahead of the US?

How this technology is defined

A paper counts if its title or abstract matches the search below. Articles in core journals and proceedings only; retracted papers are excluded.

"high performance computing" OR "high-performance computing" OR supercomputer OR supercomputing OR exascale

and its main topic in OpenAlex is one of: Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques; Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems; Interconnection Networks and Systems; Scientific Computing and Data Management; Advanced Data Storage Technologies; Matrix Theory and Algorithms. The topic check removes papers that only mention the technology.

Papers matched, 2021–2025: 2,664
In the top 10%: 269
In the top 1%: 29
Countries with credit: 45
Credit with no known country: 4.1%

Every one of the 348 most cited papers was checked for relevance; 17 were left out as not about high-performance computing

The most cited of those left out:

Julia for biologists48 citations
Practical Design Considerations for Wide Locally Recoverable Codes (LRCs)45 citations
Scalability in Computing and Robotics35 citations
Facebook's Tectonic Filesystem: Efficiency from Exascale.30 citations
Structure Fortification of Mixed CNT Bundle Interconnects for Nano Integrated Circuits Using Constraint-Based Particle Swarm Optimization30 citations
The Path to a 1-Trillion-Transistor GPU: AI's Boom Demands New Chip Technology25 citations
O-Star: An Optical Switching Architecture Featuring Mode and Wavelength-Division Multiplexing for On-Chip Many-Core Systems22 citations
Congestion-Aware Vertical Link Placement and Application Mapping Onto 3-D Network-on-Chip Architectures21 citations
A survey of SSD simulators and emulators13 citations
Network-on-Chip (NoC) Applications for IoT-Enabled Chip Systems: Latest Designs and Modern Applications10 citations
Improved Vectorization of OpenCV Algorithms for RISC-V CPUs10 citations
Machine learning-driven performance assessment of network-on-chip architectures8 citations

Definition version 0.5, pilot. It is a plain text file: copy it, change it, rerun it.

Read the method