Top500, China crushes U.S. supercomputers

The Chinese Tianhe-2 was a surprise in the Top500 list, with a performance of 33.86 petaflops, nearly double the next American system.

The arms race recovery again between the United States and China in the field of supercomputing. With the Tianhe-2, a system capable of delivering 33.86 petaflops (or 33,860,000 billions of floating point operations per second), the Middle Kingdom took the lead 41st Top500 list that most supercomputers powerful in the world.

The Tianhe-2 provides almost twice as much as the second petaflops computer from the list, the Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory within the U.S. Department of Energy. The Titan was the last champion of the list published last November with high competition in the previous Top500, compiled last November with a score of 17.59 petaflops to benchmark LinpackL'irruption Tianhe-2 is a surprise, even if information on its huge capacity had leaked on the Internet earlier this month. Experts still do not expect that the system is operational within two years.


Nodes with Intel Xeon chips

The National University of Defense Technology in China built the Tianhe-2, also known as the Milky Way-2 code, which brings with 16,000 nodes. Each node supports two Intel Xeon processors Ivy Bridge Xeon chips associated with three Phi, for a combined total of 3.12 million processing cores. The system, located at the National Center of supercomputers Guangzho in China, will be fully operational by the end of the year. The last time China had reached the top of the famous Top500, which is often dominated by a machine at the U.S. Department of Energy, it was with the Tianhe-1A, which ranked first in November 2010.

However, the United States remains the market leader in supercomputers with 253 of the 500 systems on the list. With 65 systems on the list, China ranks second, followed by Japan, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. In addition to questioning the American domination Top500, the Tianhe-2 system is distinguished by its use of technologies developed in China. "If most of the features of the system were developed in China, they use Intel for the main part of the calculation. The interconnection, operating system, and software adjuncts are mainly Chinese, "said Jack Dongarra of the Top500 in a statement. Mr. Dongarra visited the site system Tianhe-2 last hand.

4 IBM systems in the top 10

In third place this Top500, we find the Sequoia DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Blue Gene / Q system that IBM has achieved 17.17 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark with 1.5 million hearts. Overall, four IBM BlueGene systems are among the top 10.

Other interesting details about this year's Top500: twenty-six petaflop systems are now on the list, against 23 six months ago. 88% of systems use six-core processors or more, and 80% of the machines operate Intel processors. The total combined performance of all systems to 223 500 petaflops, an increase of 162 petaflops by the previous Top500, published six months ago.

This edition of the Top500, the interim ranking of the fastest publicly known supercomputers worldwide, was announced at the International Supercomputing Conference 2013 in Leipzig, Germany.