China has retained its dominance as the country with the fastest computer, this time, with the Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. This machine has a normal performance range of 93 petaflops, peak performance of 125.4 petaflops across 10,649,600 cores, and has 1.31 petabytes of main memory (7.2 TB of the memory of each node).
Sunway TaihuLight is powered by the locally made SW26010 processor, which was designed by the Shanghai High Performance IC Design Center. That is a move away from reliance on Intel Processors. China used Intel’s chips to build the world’s second fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2, which until recently held the top spot on the Top500 list.
China’s Tianhe-2 machine had maintained the top spot for three years, outperforming the U.S. “Titan” system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The Sunway TaihuLight was developed at the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC), and displaces Tianhe-2, an Intel-based Chinese supercomputer that has claimed the No. 1 spot on the past six TOP500 lists.
Sunway TaihuLight, with its 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes, is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2, which posted a LINPACK performance of 33.86 petaflop/s.
The peak power consumption under load (running the HPL benchmark) is at 15.37 MW, or 6 Gflops/Watt. This allows the TaihuLight system to grab one of the top spots on the Green500 in terms of the Performance/Power metric.
Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is now the No. 3 system. It achieved 17.59 petaflop/s.
Rounding out the Top 10 are Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Fujitsu’s K computer installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan; Mira, a BlueGene/Q system installed at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory; Trinity, a Cray X40 system installed at DOE/NNSA/LANL/SNL; Piz Daint, a Cray XC30 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and the most powerful system in Europe; Hazel Hen, a Cray XC40 system installed at HLRS in Stuttgart, Germany; and Shaheen II, a Cray XC40 system installed at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia is at No. 10.
The latest list marks the first time since the inception of the TOP500 that the U.S is not home to the largest number of systems. With a surge in industrial and research installations registered over the last few years, China leads with 167 systems and the U.S. is second with 165. China also leads the performance category, thanks to the No. 1 and No. 2 systems
