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China's Tianhe-2 retains spot as world's fastest supercomputer

The Chinese supercomputer beat out two U.S. systems, but the U.S. had five top ten entries

By Ananth Baliga
The Titan supercomputer in the U.S. came second to the China's Tianhe-2, which was twice as fast with a speed of 33.86 petaflop/s -- the equivalent of 33,863 trillion calculations per second. (Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
The Titan supercomputer in the U.S. came second to the China's Tianhe-2, which was twice as fast with a speed of 33.86 petaflop/s -- the equivalent of 33,863 trillion calculations per second. (Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Nov. 18 (UPI) -- The Tianhe-2, a Chinese-made supercomputer, has retained its place as the world's most powerful computer system -- nearly twice as fast as the next two American supercomputers.

Tianhe-2 can operate at 33.86 petaflop/s, which is the equivalent of 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second according to a test called Linpack benchmark. American super computers Titan and Sequoia came in second and third clocking 17.59 petaflop/sec and 17.17 petaflop/sec respectively.

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The announcement was made at the SC13 conference in Denver, Colorado, where five supercomputers built by IBM made the top ten.

"The Top500 has been a very useful tool in the past decades to try to have a single number that could be used to measure the performance and the evolution of high-performance computing," said Dr Alessandro Curioni, head of the computational sciences department at IBM's Zurich research lab.

The Linpack benchmark, started by Erich Strohmaier at the University of Mannheim, Germany and Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee, tests the supercomputers with a dense system of linear equations. What the benchmark fails to test is how fast data is transferred from one part of the system to the other, a key factor in real-world computing.

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"Today we need a more practical measurement that reflects the real use of these supercomputers based on their most important applications," said Curioni.

The Tianhe-2, which translates to Milky Way 2, was developed by China's National University of Defense Technology and uses a mix of processors developed by Intel as well as custom-made central processing units designed at the university.

Researchers are calling for a revision to the benchmark to take real-world practicality and energy efficiency into consideration and not only processing speeds.

[BBC]

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