China Takes The Crown For Fastest Computer in the World

Updated: June 19, 2013

Not just a few short weeks back, we saw the Titan make its way to the top of the computing pile only to now be surpassed by the Tianhe-2, which is a system built by the Chinese University of Defense Technology (NUDT) just to get their NUDT off, LOL.

This new beasty bastard comes equipped with over 3-million processing cores and over a petabyte of memory to tackle those great questions posed by the universe and need answering ☺. This is the second effort by the Chinese to take the computing crown and it seems like this time around they have succeeded in their quest of making it back to the top position on the TOP500 chart.

So how does one go about measuring performance on such a machine as the Tianhe-2? The good folks in China compiled their results using the Linkpack benchmarks to achieve the goal of number one by building a system capable of a performance metric of 33.86 Petaflops per second. I just hope it blends and plays a mean game of Minecraft or can handle taking a shot to the knee…. just saying.

While it is always inevitable that someone would make a better and faster system, it seems the clever Chinese folks delivered the goods quite ahead of schedule and unrepentantly whipped ass on the competition. The arrival of the Tianhe-2 comes an amazingly 2-years ahead of schedule and marks China’s first return to the top position since November 2010 when their Tianhe-1 reigned as king.

The new Tianhe-2 comes equipped with 16,000 nodes each with 2 Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for an amazing combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores. It really is one truly powerful and amazing machine equipped with 32,000 Xeon processors and 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors. The machine also has 12.4 petabytes of storage and consumes 17.8MW of power. The entire system is cooled by a closed air-cooling system 2 Eskimos and a penguin named Joe who works for raw fish and fresh water.

This does however show that the Chinese are not sitting on their hands and being idle, something we should be paying attention to as it shows them ahead of the curve and becoming leaders not followers in the modern world. At the end of the day its now official though, China holds the supercomputing crown and my congratulations to them in doing so especially in such a short time frame. What say you oh tech fans of the world? Computers are getting faster and smarter all the time and is that a good thing or bad? Thanks for reading Tech Of Tomorrow where your opinion always matters and we look forward to your comments below, peace.

Source: Maximum PC