China's National Defense University developed a supercomputer that remains the fastest publically known. The last edition of Top 500 supercomputer ranking published on Monday has shown that while China detains the crown in supercomputing power, the U.S. is close to an historic low.
The Chinese supercomputer is based in Guangzhou, at the National Super Computer center and it is called Tianhe-2. For more than two years already, Tianhe-2 has been on the top of the list. It has reached a maximum performance of 33,863 teraflops per second. This numbers are almost double that the performance achieved by the Cray Titan supercomputer, developed by the U.S. Department of Energy. Cray Titan is providing supercomputing power to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The third fastest supercomputer in the world is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's IBM Sequoia computer, located in California. The fourth supercomputer on the list is Japan's Fujitsu K computer being in use at the Advanced Institute for Computational Science. The only new machine to enter the top 10 is Saudi Arabia has a new machine that made it on the top 10 list, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology's Shaheen II computer, ranked seventh.
The Top 500 list provides insights into what technologies are popular in supercomputing and it is considered as an indicator of the status of investment and development in high-performance computing around the globe. Participation is voluntary and it is most possible that the fastest supercomputers in the world are not really on the public list, since it is likely they are used in military applications.
The U.S. have 231 supercomputers on the Top 500 list, however while they still reign in quantity they lost their edge. The top country in terms of the number of fast super machines is close now to its mid-2002 all-time low of 226. At that time China just began making it on the list. Since then China managed to claim 76 machines last year, but it lost its edge too and went down to only 37 supercomputers on the list at the latest count.
The top positions in the ranking show only a few major changes. One of them is a slow-down in the pace of advanced in the aggregate computing power of the 500 companies on the list. Currently this is at around 361 petaflops per second of performance. While this is still up 31 percent comparing with the last year, it also shows a noticeable slowdown in growth.
According to reports, the top 10 positions on the list reflect the rise of the use GPU computing through graphics processors. The Cray Titan and the Cray Piz Daint use Nvidia K20x processors. The three generations of Intel's Xeon E5 chips outrank all others. Haswell, IvyBridge, and SandyBridge Xeon E5 chips represent 67 percent of total performance and to be found in 80 percent of systems.
