China Still Has The World's Fastest Supercomputer

By Alex Knapp

Earlier this week, the Top500 organization announced its semi-annual list of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world. And for the second year in a row, China’s Tianhe-2 is the world’s fastest by a long shot, maintaining its performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the standardized benchmark attached to every supercomputer on the list.

In fact, the top 5 fastest supercomputers on the November 2013 list are the same as the top 5 fastest supercomputers on the June 2013 list. The second fastest supercomputer in the world is Cray’s Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Rounding out the top five are IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer, RIKEN’s K Computer in Japan, and IBM’s Mira supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory.
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The stability of the the top five is unique in the past few years, which has seen several different computers being named the fastest, while others moved down and up the ranks.

The Tianhe-2 was built by the National University of Defense Technology in China. It has a total of 3,120,000 Intel processing cores, but also features a number of Chinese built components and runs on a version of Linux called Kylin, which was natively developed by the NUDT.

The newest entry into the top ten supercomputer list is number 6 on the list, Piz Daint, a Cray system that has been installed at Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Piz Daint is now the fastest supercomputer in Europe. It’s also the most energy efficient system in the Top 10. That’s something to note, because one of the biggest constraints on supercomputing is the sheer amount of power needed to operate the systems.

“In the top 10, computers might hit a high mark,” Kai Dupke, a senior product manager at SUSE Linux told me in a conversation about the supercomputer race. “But in the usual operation, they operate more slowly simply because it’s too expensive to run on full speed.”

Although China is still home to the world’s fastest supercomputer, the United States continues to be the leader in high performance computing. In June, the United States had 253 of the top 500 fastest computers. In the November list, it has 265. China, on the other hand, has 63 computers on the list, down from the 65 it had in June.