China beats U.S. in supercomputer race

The updated version of China’s Tianhe-2 executed 33.86 petaflop/second, or 33.86 thousand trillion floating point operations per second, almost twice as fast as second place Titan, a Cray XK7 system at the Department of Energy laboratory in the U.S. The Titan, which won last year’s top place, clocked in at 17.59 petaflop/s.

 

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It was built by China’s National University of Defense Technology with 16,000 nodes. Each node runs two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors.

Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, also dropped one position and is now the No. 3 system. Sequoia was first delivered in 2011 and has achieved 17.17 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores. Sequoia is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the list, consuming a total of 7.84 MW and delivering 2,031.6 Mflops/W.

Fujitsu’s “K computer” installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, is now the No. 4 system, with a performance of 10.51 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores

A second BlueGene/Q system, Mira, installed at Argonne National Laboratory, is at No. 5 with 8.59 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 786,432 cores.