TOP500: China Has Two of Top Three Supers in the World

The latest TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is out, and it confirms the rumored takeover of the top spot by the Tianhe-1A system with 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second).

News of the Chinese system’s performance emerged in late October. As a result, the former number one system — the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee — is now ranked in second place. Jaguar achieved 1.75 petaflop/s running Linpack, the TOP500 benchmark application. Third place is now held by a Chinese system called Nebulae, which was also knocked down one spot from the June 2010 TOP500 list with the appearance of Tianhe-1A. Located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, Nebulae performed at 1.27 petaflop/s. Tsubame 2.0 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology is number four; having achieved a performance of 1.19 petaflop/s. Tsubame is the only Japanese machine in the TOP10.

The TOP10 chart above is from Heise Online. The article is in German, but it is very well-written so I posted an English version that I hope is fairly accurate.