Cc image courtesy of Marek.magrys
China has the most powerful supercomputer on earth according to a group of international researchers.
The TOP500 blog reports the Tianhe-2 by the Chinese National University of Defence Technology is the fastest supercomputer, with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.
The announcement was made during the opening session of the 2013 International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany.
The system, which means Milky Way 2 when translated and was not due to be completed until 2015,, has 16,000 nodes each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores and is China’s first return to the top since November 2010 when Tianhe 1A was the leader.
The researchers in grading the systems said the supercomputer was noteworthy for a number of reasons.
“Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part. That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese,” said TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra.
Tianhe-2 beat the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan, previously number one with a performance of 17.59 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 261,632 of its NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.
The researchers position Sequioa, also by the Department of Energy, in third with a performance of 17.17 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores.
There are three more systems with performance greater than a petaflop/s compared to 23 in December 2012. Intel holds the largest share of the TOP 500 systems processors, while the South America, Africa and Australia regions are missing from the list completely.
