China’s Tianhe-2 is now the world’s fastest super computer, with speeds reaching up to 30.65 petaflops; 74 percent faster than the current record holder Cray XK7 system-based Titan at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, according to a report by Ars Technica.
What makes it more amazing is that, the supercomputer wasn’t even running to its full capacity during the test. A five-hour Linpack test using 14,336 out of 16,000 compute nodes, or 90 percent of the machine, clocked in at 30.65 petaflops. The benchmarks are used to rank the Top 500 supercomputers in the world. The previous title holder, Titan, hit 17.59 petaflops. Tianhe-2 achieved 1.935 gigaflops per watt, which is slightly less efficient than Titan’s 2.143 gigaflops per watt.
Tianhe-2’s numbers were revealed this week in a paper by University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who created the Linpack benchmarks and helps compile the bi-annual Top 500 list.
Tianhe-2 is being assembled and tested at China’s National University for Defense Technology (NUDT), and is scheduled to arrive in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou before the end of this year. Once operational, Tianhe-2 “will provide an open platform for research and education and provide high performance computing service for southern China,” Dongarra wrote.
It is not yet known whether he had sent the computers data for the list.
Tianhe-2 is built with Intel Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi processors. “There are 32,000 Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon sockets and 48,000 Xeon Phi boards for a total of 3,120,000 cores,” Dongarra wrote. It has storage of 12.4PB and memory totaling 1.4PB. NUDT built its own proprietary interconnect which Dongarra describes as “an optoelectronics hybrid transport technology” that “uses a fat tree topology with 13 switches each of 576 ports at the top level.” Tianhe-2 runs in Kylin Linux.
source:::::siliconindianet
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