Chinese Supercomputer Tops the Charts - Again

Here is some interesting news on the super computer front.  Almost a year after the launch of Titan (the super computer not the video card) the Chinese have announced that they are once again at the top of the supercomputer world with Tianhe-2.  The new super computer is built with 3.1 million processor cores and is two years ahead of its time.

The Tianhe-2 has 32,000 Xeon processors boosted by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors for a total of 3.12 million processor cores linked together with a Chinese interconnect called TH Express-2. It's also got 1 petabyte of memory (that's about 12,500 times as much as in an ordinary personal computer), runs the university's Kylin Linux operating system, and sucks down 17.8 megawatts of power.

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Its performance is nearly double that of the machine now bumped to second place, the Cray XK7 system called Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a speed of 17.59 petaflops. Third place went to Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with a speed of 17.17 petaflops. 

There is one problem surrounding the modern super computer and that is performance per watt.  They say the most efficient systems use about 1 to 2 megawatts per petaflops.  Combine that with excess heat and power to cool the datacenter and you have a really expensive computer to run.  When Titan was built they attempted to create a very power efficient system using around 8.2 MegaWatts of power.  That is about a MegaWatt power savings over Tianhe-2 given that it is also twice as powerful.

Check out the article, it's worth a read.

Related Web URL: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57589374-76/chin...