1China’s Tianhe-2 Heads Static List of 10 Fastest Supercomputers
by Jeffrey Burt
2China Stays on Top
The Tianhe-2, housed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, offers a performance of 33.68 petaflops. It’s powered by 12-core Xeon-E5 chips from Intel, whose processors run four of the systems in the top 10.
3Titan Comes in a Distant Second
Titan, an XK7 system from Cray that is powered by Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices, delivered a performance of 17.59 petaflops.
4IBM Hits the List at No. 3
Sequoia, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is a Blue Gene/Q supercomputer from IBM that features Power chips and a performance of 17.17 petaflops. It is one of four Blue Gene/Q systems in the top 10.
5Fujitsu Makes an Appearance
Fujitsu’s K Computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan is powered by SPARC64 VIIIfx processors and delivers a performance of 10.5 petaflops.
6Mira Adds to U.S. Dominance
Mira, a Blue Gene/Q system at the Argonne National Lab, is one of five U.S. systems in the top 10, and one of 233 in the top 500. The United States still has the most supercomputers on the Top500 list, but the number is declining: In November 2013, the country had 265.
7Piz Daint and the Nvidia GPU Accelerators
The Swiss supercomputer is a Cray XC30 system that not only uses Intel Xeon E5 chips, but Nvidia’s Tesla K20x GPU accelerators. On the current list, 88 systems use either Intel Xeon Phi co-processors or GPUs from Nvidia or AMD to improve performance and keep down power consumption. There were 75 systems with accelerators on the November 2014 list.
8Introducing the Shaheen II
The only new system in the top 10, the Shaheen II is a Cray XC40 powered by Xeon E5 chips and delivers a performance of 5.5 petaflops.
9Dell in the Top 10
The Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center is based on Dell’s PowerEdge C8220 that uses both Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi chips and offers a performance of 5.1 petaflops.
10IBM’s Blue Gene/Q Appears Again
Juqueen is the third of four Blue Gene/Q supercomputers in the top 10. Overall, IBM—with 111 systems in the top 500 (22.2 percent)—is second only to Hewlett-Packard’s 178 (35.6 percent).
11Vulcan Rounds Out the Top 10
The IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, delivers a performance of 4.3 petaflops.