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Tianhe-2 Retains #1 Position on June 2015 TOP500

By R&D Editors | July 13, 2015

Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, led the list with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.For the fifth consecutive time, Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, has retained its position as the world’s No. 1 system, according to the 45th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, led the list with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark.

At No. 2 was Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Titan, the top system in the United States and one of the most energy-efficient systems on the list, achieved 17.59 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.

The only new entry in the Top 10 supercomputers on the latest list is at No. 7 — Shaheen II is a Cray XC40 system installed at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Shaheen II achieved 5.536 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark, making it the highest-ranked Middle East system in the 22-year history of the list and the first to crack the Top 10.

The other nine systems in the top 10 were all installed in 2011 or 2012, and this low level of turnover among the top supercomputers reflects a slowing trend that began in 2008.

A detailed analysis of the latest TOP500 list was presented Monday, July 13, at the 2015 International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. The full list is published at TOP500.org.

Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems with 231 (the same as the last list in November 2014), this number is down from 233 in June 2014 and down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The U.S. is nearing its historical low number on the list. 

Other highlights from the 45th list

  • Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 361 Pflop/s, compared to 309 Pflop/s last November and 274 Pflop/s one year ago. This increase in installed performance also exhibits a noticeable slowdown in growth compared to the previous long-term trend.
  • There are 67 systems with performance greater than 1 petaflop/s on the list, up from 50 last November.
  • The No. 1 system, Tianhe-2, and the No. 7 system, Stampede, use Intel Xeon Phi processors to speed up their computational rate. The No. 2 system, Titan, and the No. 6 system, Piz Daint, use NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation. 
  • A total of 88 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 75 in November 2014. Forty-nine of these use NVIDIA chips, four use ATI Radeon, and there are now 29 systems with Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi). Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (86.2 percent) of TOP500 systems. 
  • Ninety-seven percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores and 87.8 percent use eight or more cores. 
  • HP has the lead in the total number of systems with 177 (35.4 percent) compared to IBM with 108 systems (21.6 percent). Last November, HP had 179 systems and IBM had 153 systems. In the system category, Cray remains third with 71 systems (14.2 percent).

TOP 10 Sites for June 2015

For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.

Rank

Site

System

Cores

Rmax (TFlop/s)

Rpeak (TFlop/s)

Power (kW)

1

National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou
China

Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) – TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P
NUDT

3,120,000

33,862.7

54,902.4

17,808

2

DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
United States

Titan – Cray XK7 , Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x
Cray Inc.

560,640

17,590.0

27,112.5

8,209

3

DOE/NNSA/LLNL
United States

Sequoia – BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom
IBM

1,572,864

17,173.2

20,132.7

7,890

4

RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS)
Japan

K computer, SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect
Fujitsu

705,024

10,510.0

11,280.4

12,660

5

DOE/SC/Argonne National Laboratory
United States

Mira – BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom
IBM

786,432

8,586.6

10,066.3

3,945

6

Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)
Switzerland

Piz Daint – Cray XC30, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA K20x
Cray Inc.

115,984

6,271.0

7,788.9

2,325

7

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Saudi Arabia

Shaheen II – Cray XC40, Xeon E5-2698v3 16C 2.3GHz, Aries interconnect
Cray Inc.

196,608

5,537.0

7,235.2

2,834

8

Texas Advanced Computing Center/Univ. of Texas
United States

Stampede – PowerEdge C8220, Xeon E5-2680 8C 2.700GHz, Infiniband FDR, Intel Xeon Phi SE10P
Dell

462,462

5,168.1

8,520.1

4,510

9

Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ)
Germany

JUQUEEN – BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect
IBM

458,752

5,008.9

5,872.0

2,301

10

DOE/NNSA/LLNL
United States

Vulcan – BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz, Custom Interconnect
IBM

       

 

 

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