China’s supercomputer still fastest at 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second

Titan, the former world’s number one supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was surpassed and is still bested by the current reigning champ, China’s Tianhe-2.

by John Tyburski

Copyright © Daily Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

First published at Daily Digest News on November 17, 2014

Supercomputing has come a long way since IBM’s Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. One thing has not changed, however, and it is the stiff competition to be number one in power and capability. For the fourth straight time, China’s Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense and Technology, has beat the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer, which gave up the number one spot to the Chinese in November 2012.

The current supercomputer rankings were released Monday in the 44th edition of the biannual TOP500 supercomputer list revealed in Manheim, Germany; Berkeley, California, and Knoxville, Tennessee. This marks the fourth time that Tianhe-2 sits atop the competition with Titan coming in at second place.

“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,” according to a statement by TOP500.

Tianhe-2 can perform 33.86 petaflops per second on a benchmark test called Linpack. This translates to 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second. For perspective, typical personal computer processor speed is quantified in millions of calculations per second.

The U.S. still leads the world in overall systems with its 231 supercomputing systems, the number is down from 233 documented back in June and down from 265 reported on last year’s November list. The present number for the U.S. is nearing an historic low, even though it added a new 3.57 petaflop Cray CS-Storm system kept in an undisclosed government site that took the number 10 spot on the new TOP500 list.

The number of supercomputing systems in Europe is up from 116 reported in June at a current 130. Asia’s number dropped from 132 to 120. China itself has dropped from 76 to 61 systems. Japan added systems and went from 30 in June to 32 current supercomputers.

TOP500 began reporting and ranking supercomputing systems in June 1993. Since that time, growth rates in performance have generally declined and are currently at historic lows after the past two years showing relatively minor performance increases.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and Martin Meuer of Germany’s Prometeus.