Top ten Super Computers in the World
The
twice-a-year list of the Top
500 supercomputers
documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers
are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and
appearance as well. Here’s a look at the top finishers in the latest Top 500
list, which was released Monday, June 20, 2011 at the ISC 11 conference in
Germany.
K SUPERCOMPUTER, RIKEN Advanced
Institute for Computational Science (AICS), Japan
The “K” supercomputer,
a joint project by Fujitsu and the RIKEN center, has overtaken China’s
Tianhe-1A system to gain the top spot on the updated list. The K computer
system, currently in the configuration stage, features 68,544 Sparc 64 CPUs,
each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores—almost twice as many as any
other system in the TOP500. The K Computer is also more powerful than
the next five systems on the list combined. The system is deployed across 672
computer racks and has a power consumption of 9.89 megawatts. The K Computer’s
name draws upon the Japanese word “Kei” for 10^16 (ten quadrillions),
representing the system’s performance goal of 10 petaflops.
TIANHE-1A, National Supercomputing
Center, Tianjin, China
The Tianhe-1A, the most powerful supercomputer in the world
as of November 2010.
The
Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer
Center in Tianjin slipped back into second in the latest survey, achieving a
performance level of 2.6 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second).
Tianhe-1A is one of the 19 systems in the Top 500 that use NVIDIA GPUs
(graphics processing units) to accelerate computation, up from 17 in the
November survey.
JAGUAR, Oak Ridge National
Laboratory
Jaguar was
the top performer in the June 2010 survey, but fell back to second in November
2010 and now slips to third overall with a 1.75 petaflop performance speed
running the Linpack benchmark. Jaguar is a Cray XT5 system located at the
Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee.
While Jaguar fell a few flops short this year, it retains a leadership position
in supercomputing style with its striking Jaguar motif.
NEBULAE, China
Nebulae,
which is located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China,
achieved 1.271 PFlop/s to rank fourth overall, down one position from the
November survey. Nebulae was built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with
Intel X5650 processors and NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU.
TSUBAME 2.0, GSIC Center, Tokyo
Institute of Technology
Like
the top-ranked Tianhe system, Tsubame 2.0 is a successor system that builds
upon the design of a previously-ranked system. Tsubame 2.0 was developed by the
Tokyo Institute of Technology in collaboration with NEC and HP, and is powered
by more than 1,400 nodes using both HP Proliant servers and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.
It is Japan’s highest-ranked supercomputer. Plans are being developed for
Tsubame 3.0.
We
continue our illustrated review of the top finishers in the latest Top 500
list, which was released Monday at the ISC 11 conference in Germany. See part one for
images of the five most powerful machines. We continue at number six.
CIELO, Los Alamos National Labs
The
new supercomputer named Cielo, the Spanish word for sky, will
support all three national laboratories at the National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA), including Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore. Cielo is
the next generation capability class platform for the Advanced Simulation and
Computing (ASC) program. Cielo’s architecture is based on Cray’s next
generation “Baker” architecture with AMD’s new Magny-Cours processor, Cray’s
“Gemini” high-speed interconnect and Compute Node Linux operating system.
PLEIADES, NASA Ames Research Center
One
of the big movers n the latest survey is Pleiades,
a supercomputer at the NASA Ames Reseach Center in Mountain Vew, Calif. It
achieved a LINPACK benchmark of 1.09 petaflop/s), Since last June, NASA has
implemented a series of expansions to the system’s performance capabilities,
adding 14 new SGI Altix ICE 8400 systems so that Pleiades now contains 23,296
Intel Xeon quad- and hex-core processors (111,104 cores in 182 racks). Pleiades
is used to meet the computing needs on NASA’s most demanding modeling and
simulation projects in aeronautics; Earth and space science; exploration
systems and technologies; and future space operations.
HOPPER, NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley
National Labs
Hopper
is named for American computer scientist Grace Hopper, and now powers science
research at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC)
at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Hopper is powered by the Cray XE6 system. A
pioneer in the field of software development and programming languages, Hopper
created the first compiler. The Hopper system clocked in at 1.05 petaflop/s.
TERA-100, CEA, France
A cool shot of
the Tera-100 supercomputer, a Bull-powered system at the French atomic energy
agency.
Tera-100
is now Europe’s most powerful supercomputer. The system resides at the
Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA), where it supports the French nuclear
weapons simulation program. era 100 consists of 4,300 bullx S Series servers,
which were introduced by Bull in April 2010. It features 140,000 Intel Xeon
7500 processing cores, 300TB of central memory and a total storage capacity of
over 20PB.
ROADRUNNER, Los Alamos National
Laboratory
When
the Roadrunner system
at Los Alamos first appeared at the top of the June 2008 TOP500 list, it was
the world’s first supercomputer to achieve a top performance of more than 1
petaflop/s (1015 floating point operations per second). It has now slipped to
seventh place in the latest survey.
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