China’s Super Computer Will Do 100,000 Trillion Computing Operations in a

Tianhe-2, the supercomputer behemoth from China, retained its position as the world’s most powerful supercomputer in the list of the top 500 machines across the globe. Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, led the list with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark.

With 231 machines in the Top 500 list, the US remains the top country in terms of the number of supercomputers, but that’s close to the all-time low of 226 hit in mid-2002.

The Shaheen (Peregrine Falcon) II has a peak number-crunching capacity of 5.536 petaflops making it, said the Top 500, “the highest-ranked Middle East system in the 22-year history of the list and the first to crack the Top 10”. It rose to claim 76 machines this time past year, but the latest count has China at 37 computers.

Backed up by the Chinese Academy of Sciences the Dawning Information Industry developed Nebulae or Dawning 6000 has been listed in the world’s most super computers its measured Linpack value of 1.271 petaflop times a second.

That’s the pronouncement of researchers who assembled the twice-a-year Top500 list of the world’s top supercomputers, released this morning at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany.

As noted by HPC Guru, on the processor front Intel still dominates the supercomputer field with 86 percent of systems running its chips, followed by IBM with an eight percent share and AMD at 4.4 percent.

The entry point to make it on the Top500 list also increased to 165 teraflops, or trillions of flops. IBM was second with 111 systems in total. IBM takes the second spot with a 22.2 percent share, down from 28 percent last November. It serves as a mainframe tailor-made for sure software. The 500th system on the list is owned by a unnamed financial institution in the U.S.

This is supported by the fact that the performance of the last system on the list (No. 500) has consistently lagged behind historical growth trends for the past five years, a trajectory that now increases by 55 percent each year. Many of those at the top of the list were installed and first operated in 2011 and 2012, it said.

But Intel’s Xeon E5 chip continues to outrank all others. HP has 178 systems in the list, while IBM has 111. Cray came in third with 71. Four systems use a combination of Nvidia and Intel Xeon Phi accelerators/co-processors.