China Supercomputer Tianhe-2 Beats The US Titan Badly
The China supercomputer called the Tianhe-2 is beating the best United States supercomputers by quite a lot.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, the China supercomputer is like the final nail in the coffin for the United States’ lead with supercomputers.
For example, the $121 million IBM Roadrunner supercomputer is headed for retirement despite still being classified as one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. That was built in 2008, but, in 2009, the United States Department of Defense was actually relying on ordering PlayStation 3 video game consoles, which featured the CELL process, in order to increase the power of their supercomputers.
The new Chinese supercomputer was developed by the National University of Defense Technology. The name Tianhe-2 is translated to Milky Way-2.
According to the benchmarks used by Top500, an organization that tracks supercomputers, China’s supercomputer spits out an amazing 33.86 PetaFLOPS per second, or 33,860 trillion calculations per second. As a comparison, the US Department of Energy’s Titan supercomputer was the former world’s fastest supercomputer, but it only achieved about half the performance of the Tianhe-2 at 17.59 PetaFLOPS per second.
TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra says the China supercomputer Tianhe-2 was built entirely with Intel processors, but the overall design, efficiency, and operating system were designed in China:
“Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main computer part. That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese,”
China’s supercomputer contains 16,000 nodes, which each contain two Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, for a total of 3,120,000 total CPU cores.
To put that in perspective, most consumer computers usually have eight CPU cores at most. A single Xeon Phi processor card costs between $3,000 and $5,000 each.
What do you think about China’s supercomputer the Tianhe-2 beating the United States so soundly?
