Chinese supercomputer "Tianhe-2" is once again recognized as the fastest in the world

With a performance of 33.86 pataflops (quadrillion operations per second), the Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-2 for the third consecutive year retains the world's fastest supercomputer title in the Top500 list, which is compiled every six months and consists of the fastest computers on Earth. The results and the winner of the new comparison were announced on Monday at an international conference on supercomputer technologies in Leipzig, Germany.

Recall that "Tianhe-2" was developed in the Chinese Defense Science and Technology University of the PLA. His predecessor, "Tianhe-1A" was the top line of the list of the most powerful supercomputers in 2010. Top500 organizers note that the top ten supercomputers on the list have hardly been changed since last year. An exception, perhaps, according to the official site Top500.org, may be a newcomer "Cray XC30", based in "an unnamed American government organization."

As expected, most of the 500 systems presented are American. It should be noted that the US still has the largest number of functioning supercomputers. They have 233 pieces. The second place is occupied by China. The Asian nation increased their number from 63 to 76 pieces. Next come Great Britain (30 supercomputers), Japan (30 supercomputers), France (27 supercomputers) and Germany (23 supercomputers).

Supercomputers, as you might guess, have absolutely nothing to do with ordinary computers that are installed in our homes or in work offices. They also have very little in common with server solutions, which can usually be found in large companies. Supercomputers consist of thousands of nodes and are designed to work with complex mathematical problems and solve very complex problems. In other words - for research and development. That's why most of them are in closed and well-guarded military bases and laboratories.

Organizers of Top500 note that the rate of overall productivity growth of the presented systems on the list is slowing down. If before the performance of supercomputers, which were on the list of the last lines, increased year by year by 90 percent, now this figure is only 55 percent. Part of this decrease can be caused by the lack of new systems in the top lines of the list of the most powerful supercomputers. Despite the almost complete absence of changes in the list, most of these supercomputers will become even more super, if I may say so. Engineers of "Tianhe-2" by 2018 are planning to increase the productivity of their system to 100 petaflops.

It is interesting that only 37 out of 500 listed systems have a capacity of more than 1 petaflops. Almost all of them work on the basis of multi-core processors, 85 percent of which are processors from Intel. As for the systems themselves, 36 percent of supercomputers are collected by HP, 33 percent represent IBM supercomputers. The share of supercomputers Cray is 10 percent.

To test system performance, computer scientists use the Linpack benchmark, in which each system performs a solution of dense systems of linear algebraic equations. This test is not aimed at determining the overall performance of a supercomputer, most likely, it shows the performance of the system when performing this particular task. Organizers of the Top500 insist that in the world there is not a single benchmark that could fully and effectively measure the overall performance of a particular computer system.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/technology/kitajskij-superkompyuter-tyanxe-2-v-ocherednoj-raz-priznan-samym-bystrym-v-mire.html.