China once again boasts world's fastest supercomputer

The Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, was named the world's top supercomputer for the fourth consecutive time by the TOP500 project. [Photo/Xinhua]

The Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, was named the world's top supercomputer for the fourth consecutive time by the TOP500 project.

The Tianhe-2 relegated the US-developed Titan to second spot with a performance of 33.86 petaflop (quadrillions of calculations per second) in a standardized test designed to measure computer performance.

IBM's Sequoia rounded out the top 3 in the TOP500 list.

The TOP500 project, started in 1993, issues a list twice a year that ranks supercomputers based on their performance.

There was little change in the top 10 in the latest list and the only new entry was at number 10 – the Cray CS-Storm, developed by Cray Inc, which also developed the Titan.

The United States was home to six of the top 10 supercomputers, while China, Japan, Switzerland and Germany had one entrant each.

The United States remained the top country in terms of overall systems with 231, down from 233 in June and falling near its historical low.

The number of Chinese systems on the list also dropped to 61 from 76 in June, while Japan increased its number of systems from 30 to 32.

- China Daily/ Asia News Nework

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Tianhe-2, Chinese supercomputer named as world’s fastest

BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese university has built the world’s fastest supercomputer, almost doubling the speed of the U.S. machine that previously claimed the top spot and underlining China’s rise as a science and technology powerhouse.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/tianhe-2_n_3458981.html The Tianhe-2 has a peak performance speed of 54.9 quadrillion operations per second.

The semiannual TOP500 listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers released Monday says the Tianhe-2 developed by the National University of Defense Technology in central China’s Changsha city is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. That’s the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the U.S. Energy Department’s Titan machine off the No. 1 spot. It achieved 17.59 petaflops per second.

Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modeling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions and designing jetliners.

It’s the second time a Chinese computer has been named the world’s fastest. In November 2010, the Tianhe-2′s predecessor, Tianhe-1A, had that honor before Japan’s K computer overtook it a few months later on the TOP500 list, a ranking curated by three computer scientists at universities in the U.S. and Germany.

The Tianhe-2 shows how China is leveraging rapid economic growth and sharp increases in research spending to join the United States, Europe and Japan in the global technology elite.

“Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part,” TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra, who toured the Tianhe-2 facility in May, said in a news release. “That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese.”