China Supercomputer Is The World’s Fastest
In the unending battle to have the world’s fastest supercomputer, China’s latest once again gives it an edge over top rivals the U.S. and Japan. The Chinese Tianhe-2, built by the National University of Defense Technology in China. It will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho – two years ahead of schedule.
Tianhe-2 is built entirely with Intel processors. It contains 16,000 nodes, which each contain two Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, for a total of 3,120,000 total processor cores. And those cores are doing the job. According to the benchmarks used by Top500, it performs a staggering 33.86 petaflop/s. That’s nearly twice as fast as Titan, which has a performance benchmark of 17.59 petaflop/s.
And just to show you how far things have come in just two and a half years, the Tianhe-1A performs at 2.56 petaflop/s. Don’t feel too bad for the old winner, thought – it’s still the 10th fastest supercomputer in the world.
Another aspect of the Tianhe-2 is that it shows how rapidly China is advancing in the world of IT. Although the processors may have come from Intel, everything else – from the design to the operating system – was developed in China.
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