New Chinese Supercomputer Is the World's Most Powerful

A new Chinese supercomputer has debuted atop the recently released list of the world's most powerful computing systems.

The Tianhe-2 again gives China the lead over the US in the two countries' ongoing supercomputer competition.

The system, which the government-run National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) developed, topped the latest biannual Top500 supercomputer list with a tested performance of 33.86 petaflops (one petaflops is 1015 flops).

That's much faster than the second and formerly top-ranked Top500 system, the US's Titan. That system, made by Cray and housed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, performs 17.59 petaflops.

The Tianhe-2 is expected to have a theoretical peak performance of 54.9 petaflops when completed. The NUDT is currently assembling and testing the system, which it plans to deliver to the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou by the end of this year.

The supercomputer uses 32,000 Intel Xeon processors boosted by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors. There are a total of 3.12 million cores linked by the Chinese TH Express-2 interconnect.

Most of the Tianhe-2's components are Chinese-made, including the NUDT's Kylin Linux operating system. The supercomputer has 12.4 petabytes of storage and 1 petabyte of memory.

Among the Top500 systems, the US now has 252, China has 66, Japan has 30, the UK has 29, and France has 23.

Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, compile the list.