A Chinese supercomputer appears to have taken the #1 spot on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Although the final rankings of the twice-yearly published list is not yet final, Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who co-manages the Top500 list, says that “it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster.” Dongarra adds that the Chinese computer, which achieved 2.5 Pflop/s (2.5 x 1015 floating-point operations per second) on the industry-standard Linpack benchmark, “blows away the existing No. 1 machine.”
The new system, according to a separate report by Dongarra, has 7168 computational nodes, each of which contains two six-core Xeon processors with a clock speed of 2.93 GHz, together with an NVIDIA graphics processor. The aggregate peak theoretical performance of the system is 4.7 Pflop/s.
As an article in the New York Times notes [Vance2010]:
The race to build the fastest supercomputer has become a source of national pride as these machines are valued for their ability to solve problems critical to national interests in areas like defense, energy, finance and science. …
Over the last decade, the Chinese have steadily inched up in the rankings of supercomputers. Tianhe-1A stands as the culmination of billions of dollars in investment and scientific development, as China has gone from a computing afterthought to a world technology superpower.
Although the Chinese system was assembled mostly from off-the shelf components produced by U.S. technology firms such as Intel and NVIDIA, one key to the system’s impressive performance is a custom interconnection network developed by Chinese researchers. It is significantly faster than Infiniband, which is one of the most widely used commercial networks for similar systems sold by major U.S. technology firms.
Until 2002, the #1 system had almost always been in the US. In that year, a Japanese govenrnment-funded project placed into production a system called the “Earth Simulator,” which at the time had more computing power than the top 20 American systems combined. The US government then responded by pouring money into supercomputing technology and installed several large systems at government-funded laboratories. It regained the lead in 2004 and has held it since then. Now that the lead has once again been claimed by a system outside the US, it will be interesting to see the response.
For additional details, see [Vance2010], from which some of the above was excerpted.
References
- [Vance2010] Ashlee Vance, “China Wrests Supercomputer Title From U.S.” New York Times, 28 Oct 2010, available at Online article.