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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