China Once Again Boasts The World's Fastest Supercomputer

Every six months, the Top500 Organization ranks the five hundred fastest supercomputers in the world. And for the fourth consecutive list, Chinas Tianhe-2 is on top, performing at 33.86 petaflop/s according to the organizations benchmarks. Thats nearly twice as fast as the number two computer, Crays Titan at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Tianhe-2 resides at Chinas National University of Defense Technology. It cost approximately $390 million to build and is comprised of thousands of Intel Intel Xeon E5-2692v2 12C 2.2GHz processors. It runs a version of Linux that was developed by the NUDT.

The rest of the top ten was the same as last years list, with one exception a Cray supercomputer thats installed at an undisclosed U.S. government site. Interestingly enough, this is the second list in a row where the only newcomer to the top 10 list was a Cray supercomputer installed at an undisclosed U.S. government site.

Cray has actually seen a nice bump on this top 500 list. It has 62 total systems on the list, 11 more than it did in June. HP has the most supercomputers on the list, with 179. IBM has the second-most with 153 systems. However, both HP and IBM have fewer systems on this list than they did on the last one.

When it comes to processors, though, Intel dominates. 85.8% of the supercomputers on the list use Intel processors and 25 use Intels Xeon Phi co-processors, including the Tianhe-2.

You can see the full list of the 500 fastest supercomputers here.

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China Once Again Boasts The World's Fastest Supercomputer