MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.--Tianhe-2, a super
computer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, is
the world’s new No. 1 system with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s on the
Linpack benchmark, according to the 41stedition of the twice-yearlyTOP500 l
ist of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The list was announced Jun
e 17 during the opening session of the 2013 International Supercomputing Con
ference in Leipzig, Germany.
Tianhe-2, or Milky Way-2, will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Cen
ter in Guangzho, China, by the end of the year. The surprise appearance of T
ianhe-2, two years ahead of the expected deployment, marks China’s first re
turn to the No. 1 position since November 2010, when Tianhe-1A was the top s
ystem. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge process
ors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined total of 3,120,000 computin
g cores.
Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory and previously the No. 1 system, is now ranke
d No. 2. Titan achieved 17.59 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 261,
632 of its NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores. Titan is one of the most energy ef
ficient systems on the list, consuming a total of 8.21 MW and delivering 2,1
43 Mflops/W.
Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore Nat
ional Laboratory, also dropped one position and is now the No. 3 system. Seq
uoia was first delivered in 2011 and has achieved 17.17 petaflop/s on the Li
npack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores. Sequoia is also one of the most energ
y efficient systems on the list, consuming a total of 7.84 MW and delivering
2,031.6 Mflops/W.
Fujitsu’s “K computer” installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Comp
utational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, is now the No. 4 system with a perf
ormance of 10.51 Pflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 proc
essing cores
A second BlueGene/Q system, Mira, installed at Argonne National Laboratory i
s at No. 5 with 8.59 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 786,432 cores
.
Rounding out the Top 10 are the upgraded Stampede at the Texas Advanced Comp
uting Center of the University of Texas, Austin; JUQUEEN at the Forschungsze
ntrum Juelich in Germany (and the most powerful system in Europe); an IBM Bl
ueGene/Q system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; SuperMUC, an IBM
iDataplex system installed at Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Germany; and Tianhe-1
A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China.
According to TOP500 Editor Jack Dongarra, who toured the Tianhe-2 developmen
t facility in May, the system is noteworthy in a number of aspects. “Most o
f the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only usin
g Intel for the main compute part. That is, the interconnect, operating syst
em, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese,” Dongarra said.
Other highlights from the June 2013 TOP500 List, which can be found at www.t
op500.org, include:
?There are 26 systems with performance greater than a petaflop/s, up from 23
six months ago.
?The new No. 1 system, Tianhe-2, and the No. 6 system, Stampede, are using I
ntel Xeon Phi processors to speed up their computational rate. The No. 2 sys
tem, Titan, and the No. 10 system, Tianhe-1A, are using NVIDIA GPUs to accel
erate computation.
? A total of 54 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor techn
ology, down from 62 in November 2012. Thirty-nine of these use NVIDIA chips,
three use ATI Radeon, and eleven systems use Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi
).
?The number of systems installed in China has now stabilized at 66, with 72
and 68 on the last two lists. As a nation, China now holds the No. 2 positio
n as a user of HPC, ahead of Japan, UK, France, and Germany. Due to Tianhe-2
, China has also taken the No. 2 position in the performance share, ahead of
Japan.
?Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (80.4 perce
nt) of TOP500 systems.
?Eighty-eight percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores,
and 67 percent with eight or more cores.
?IBM’s BlueGene/Q is still the most popular system in the TOP10 with four e
ntries, including No. 3, 5, 7, and 8.
?The entry level on the list moved up to the 96.6 teraflop/s mark on the Lin
pack benchmark, compared to 76.5 Tflop/s six months ago.
?The last system on the newest list was listed at position 322 in the previo
us TOP500 just six months ago.
?Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 223 Pflop/s, com
pared to 162 Pflop/s six months ago and 123 Pflop/s one year ago.
Geographical observations
?The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems, with 252 of the 50
0 systems (250 last time). The European share (112 systems – 105 last time)
is still lower than the Asian share (119 systems – 123 last time).
?Dominant countries in Asia are China with 66 systems (down from 72) and Jap
an with 30 systems (down from 32).
?In Europe, UK, France, and Germany, are almost equal with 29, 23, and 19 re
spectively.
About the TOP500 ListThe first version of what became today’s TOP500 list s
tarted as an exercise for a small conference in Germany in June 1993. Out of
curiosity, the authors decided to revisit the list in November 1993 to see
how things had changed. About that time they realized they might be on to so
mething and decided to continue compiling the list, which is now a much-anti
cipated, much-watched and much-debated twice-yearly event.
The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Ger
many; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laborat
ory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.