It's Official: China Once Again Leads the TOP500

The June 2013 TOP500 was released today at ISC’13 with an all-new Chinese supercomputer leading the list with 33.86 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark.

Tianhe-2, or Milky Way-2, will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, by the end of the year. The surprise appearance of Tianhe-2, two years ahead of the expected deployment, marks China’s first return to the No. 1 position since November 2010, when Tianhe-1A was the top system. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores.

Formerly number one on the list, the Titan Cray XK7 at Oak Ridge is now ranked No. 2 with 17.59 Petaflops and Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at LLNL falls to number 3 on the list with 17.17 petaflops.

Other highlights from the June 2013 TOP500 list include:

  • There are 26 systems with performance greater than a Petaflop, up from 23 six months ago.
  • The new No. 1 system, Tianhe-2, and the No. 6 system, Stampede, are using Intel Xeon Phi processors to speed up their computational rate. The No. 2 system, Titan, and the No. 10 system, Tianhe-1A, are using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation.
  • A total of 54 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, down from 62 in November 2012. Thirty-nine of these use NVIDIA chips, three use ATI Radeon, and eleven systems use Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi).
  • The number of systems installed in China has now stabilized at 66, with 72 and 68 on the last two lists. As a nation, China now holds the No. 2 position as a user of HPC, ahead of Japan, UK, France, and Germany. Due to Tianhe-2, China has also taken the No. 2 position in the performance share, ahead of Japan.
  • Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (80.4 percent) of TOP500 systems.

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