China’s Tianhe-2 Takes Top Spot on Top500 List From Cray’s Titan

China’s Tianhe-2 Takes Top Spot on Top500 List From Cray’s Titan

by Jeffrey Burt

China’s Tianhe-2 Uses Primarily Home-Grown Technology

The supercomputer is powered by more than 3.12 million Intel processor cores, but according to Top500 editor Jack Dongarra, “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.”

Cray’s Titan Supercomputer Drops to No. 2

Titan, a Cray XK7 supercomputer powered by AMD’s Opteron chips and Nvidia GPU accelerators, hit the top of the list in November 2012, but was quickly bounced by Tianhe-2. It’s also among the most energy-efficient systems.

Sequoia Is the Largest of Four BlueGene/Q Systems in the Top 10

Sequoia, first delivered to the Lawrence Livermore Lab in 2011, delivers 17.17 petaflops per second of performance and is armed with more than 1.57 million IBM Power cores. It also is highly energy-efficient.

Fujitsu’s K Computer Drops to No. 4

The supercomputer, at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan, is powered by 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores. It offers 10.51 petaflops per second of performance.

Mira Is Another IBM BlueGene/Q Supercomputer

Mira is installed at Argonne National Laboratory, runs on 786,432 Power cores and delivers 8.59 petaflops per second of performance.

Stampede Is Based on Dell PowerEdge Servers

The PowerEdge systems are designed for such hyperscale environments, and run on eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2680 chips and Xeon Phi coprocessors. The system delivers more than 5.1 petaflops per second of performance.

JuQueen in Germany Runs on 458,752 IBM Power Cores

JuQueen, at the Forschungszentrum Juelich supercomputing center in Germany, offers a performance of almost 5.1 petaflops per second. It’s the most powerful supercomputer in Europe.

Vulcan Is the Fourth BlueGene/Q System in the Top 10

Installed at the Lawrence Livermore Labs, Vulcan’s 393,216 Power cores deliver almost 4.3 petaflops per second of performance.

SuperMUC Is an IBM iDataPlex System

SuperMUC, at the Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Germany, is powered by 147,456 Intel Xeon E5-2600 cores and has a top performance of 2.89 petaflops per second.

China’s Tianhe-1A Rounds Out the Top 10

Based at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, Tianhe-1A at one time was the world’s fastest supercomputer. IT leverages Xeon processors from Intel and GPU accelerators from Nvidia, and offers a top performance of 1.86 petaflops per second.