Jeff Nichols, associate director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in front of Titan, which was the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2012 but is now ranked No. 3. (File photo courtesy ORNL/October 2013)
China maintained its number one ranking in the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers, but with a new system built entirely using processors designed and made in China.
China now has the top two supercomputers on the semiannual TOP500 list, and Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has dropped from number two to number three.
The new Chinese supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight, is capable of 93 petaflops, or quadrillions of calculations per second, a press release said.
It displaced Tianhe-2, an Intel-based Chinese supercomputer that had claimed the number one spot on the past six TOP500 lists. Tianhe-2 achieved a speed of 33.86 petaflops, or more than 33,000 trillion calculations per second, in a test known as the LINPACK benchmark.
Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at ORNL, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, achieved 17.59 petaflops.
Titan was the top system for a short time. It was number one in November 2012, but it was bumped to number two behind Tianhe-2 in June 2013. This is the first time it has been number three.
The latest list marks the first time since the start of the TOP500 that the United States is not home to the largest number of systems. With a surge in industrial and research installations registered over the last few years, China leads with 167 systems and the U.S. is second with 165. China also leads the performance category, thanks to the number one and number two systems, the press release said. [Read more…]
