The World’s Most Powerful Computer - 3,120,000 Cores

[BiG StroOnZ]

 

 

 

 

The Tianhe-2, which translates to “Milky Way-2” in English, is so powerful that it required a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers from China’s National University of Defense Technology to build it. Sponsored by the People’s Republic of China’s State High-Tech Development Plan, the computer was built on the premise that China could one day become independent of financial obligations for foreign technologies. The computer is so powerful, that it’s able to perform 33,860 trillion calculations per second. One hour of these calculations by the machine is the equivalent of 1,000 years of difficult sums by 1.3 billion people 

 

The machine is capable of performing 33.86 quadrillion floating point operations — or FLOPS — in a single second. A floating point operation is a math problem that involves fractional numbers, and when measured in quadrillions is usually referred to as a petaflop.

 

The U.S. upped the ante in the ongoing rivalry with China last week when the Department of Energy said it would spend $325 million to build a new pair of machines, at least one of which stands a chance at retaking the world-computing crown. It tapped IBM and the chipmaker Nvidia to help build them, and said they should be up and running by 2017.

 

One of them, dubbed Summit, is being designed for nearly nine times the performance of the Tianhe-2, or about 300 petaflops, which is pretty close to the combined performance — 309 petaflops — of all 500 supercomputers on today’s list.

 

So who builds these machines? Of the 500 supercomputers on the list, 179, or more than 35 percent, were built by Hewlett-Packard. IBM built 153, Cray built 62, SGI built 18 and Dell built nine. Nearly 86 percent of them relied on Intel chips while eight percent used chips from IBM. Another 75 systems used graphics accelerator chips from Nvidia, which are helpful in part because they’re designed specifically to handle floating-point operations.

 

But, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, China’s Tianhe-2, was designed by the university that houses it and is built with the help of Inspur, a Chinese computing and IT company.

 

Specs:

• Cores: 3,120,000
• Linpack Performance (Rmax): 33,862.7 TFlop/s
• Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 54,902.4 TFlop/s
• Power: 17,808.00 kW
• Memory: 1,024,000 GB
• Interconnect: TH Express-2
• Operating System: Kylin Linux
• Compiler: icc
• Math Library: Intel MKL-11.0.0
• MPI: MPICH2 with a customized GLEX Channel

 

With 16,000 computer nodes, each composed of two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi coprocessor chips, the Tianhe-2 is almost twice as fast as the second computer on the list: the United States’ Cray Titan. 

 

Source: http://recode.net/2014/11/17/the-worlds-most-powerful-computer-is-still-in-china/

 

 

Yes, we know can it run Crysis? More importantly what it probably is used for:

 

-Recreating the Big Bang

-Understanding earthquakes

-Folding Proteins

-Mapping the blood stream

-Testing nuclear weapons

-Forecasting hurricanes/typhoons

-Predicting climate change

-Building brains

-Financial Stuffs

[brownninja97]

oh fuck off with your cores my old i3 demands a 1v1

[MountainDrew]

Holy balls...

[SeanBond]

I bet the pentium anniversary can run games better.

[Laputacake]

But can it run Minesweeper?

[Kherm]

I wonder how it performs in single-threaded applications 

[SSL]

Meanwhile, US weather forecasting is worst in the world because the government won't provide funding for this kind of shit.

[alby800]

@Laputacake dangit you beat me to it

[ACatWithThumbs]

Meanwhile, US weather forecasting is worst in the world because the government won't provide funding for this kind of shit.

Actually Nvidia is making a new 2 new supercomputers one is 2x as fast and the other one is over 4x faster and that with only 3,400 nodes.

It was even in the news section here a while ago.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8727/nvidia-ibm-supercomputers

[atrash]

What's with those uv lights anyway? 

[L.E.D]

These system dont really excite me, theyre designed specifically to do what it is doing. Sure the number of what it can do is nice but still its not like I can benefit from this in any way lol

[Laputacake]

@Laputacake dangit you beat me to it

Mwhahaha 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPKzyDBbxbM

[AlexGoesHigh]

that list of aplication is kinda of contradictory if its also being used for financial stuff

[SSL]

Actually Nvidia is making a new 2 new supercomputers one is 2x as fast and the other one is over 4x faster and that with only 3,400 nodes.

It was even in the news section here a while ago.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8727/nvidia-ibm-supercomputers

 

Nvidia can make all the supercomps they want, it won't help if the NWS doesn't have one.

[BiG StroOnZ]

that list of aplication is kinda of contradictory if its also being used for financial stuff

 

Edited.

[wng_kingsley7]

I would definitely not want a PC like that,,,you see that Wattage reading, couldn't pay for the power bill

[mr moose]

All that processing power and they still can't kind find the solution to world poverty or war? 

[ACatWithThumbs]

Nvidia can make all the supercomps they want, it won't help if the NWS doesn't have one.

I would say those applications help quiet a lot.

[FireFox]

I can't wait to see some future supercomputers using the upcoming Tesla K80. That could be interesting

[SSL]

I would say those applications help quiet a lot.

 

 

My meaning was that the NWS does not have physical machines to run their models on.

[Tonylu1595]

So no one said the "Still can't run assassin's creed unity" joke? Impressed.

[Tech_Dreamer]

My Sempron just had a heart attack..

[wpirobotbuilder]

Hurricane prediction errors are a third of what they were several decades ago. That's quite an accomplishment.

 

The power consumption is the most interesting aspect to me. Does anyone know how it compares to less powerful supercomputers?

[RexinOridle]

Yeah but not on a single CPU

[bmayfield20]

But can it run Minesweeper?

But dose it have Pinball and MS Paint? Take that Supercomputer!