For the third consecutive time, Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, has retained its position as the world’s No. 1 system with a performance of 33.86 Pflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark, according to the 43rdedition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
In fact, there was little change among the ranking of the world’s top 10 supercomputers in the latest edition of the closely watched list. The only new entry was at number 10—a 3.14 Pflop/s Cray XC30 installed at an undisclosed U.S. government site.
A detailed analysis of the latest TOP500 list will be presented Monday, June 23, at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany. At that time, the full list will also be published at TOP500.org.
Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems with 233, this is down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The number of Chinese systems on the list rose from 63 to 76, giving the Asian nation nearly as many supercomputers as the UK, with 30; France, with 27; and Germany, with 23; combined. Japan also increased its showing, up to 30 from 28 on the previous list.
Highlights from the 43rd list
Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 274 Pflop/s, compared to 250 Pflop/s six months ago and 223 Pflop/s one year ago. This increase in installed performance also exhibits a noticeable slowdown in growth compared to the previous long-term trend.
There are 37 systems with performance greater than a Pflop/s on the list, up from 31 six months ago.
The No. 1 system, Tianhe-2, and the No. 7 system, Stampede, use Intel Xeon Phi processors to speed up their computational rate. The No. 2 system, Titan, and the No. 6 system, Piz Daint, use NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation.
A total of 62 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 53 from November 2013. Forty-four of these use NVIDIA chips, two use ATI Radeon, and there are now 17 systems with Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi). The average number of accelerator cores for these 62 systems is 78,127 cores/system.
Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (85.4 percent) of TOP500 systems. The share of IBM Power processors remains at 8 percent, while the AMD Opteron family is used in 6 percent of the systems, down from 9 percent on the previous list.
Ninety-six percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores and 83 percent use eight or more cores.
HP has the lead in systems and now has 182 systems (36 percent) compared to IBM with 176 systems (35 percent). HP had 196 systems (39 percent) six months ago, and IBM had 164 systems (33 percent) six months ago. In the system category, Cray remains third with 10 percent (50 systems).
Corrections and Changes since the release:
Fixed linpack data of a system @ SURFsara which made it appear at #421
Change site of #255, system data and linpack did not change
TOP 10 Sites for June 2014
For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.
