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US retakes first place from Japan on Top500 supercomputer ranking
The United States is on top of the supercomputing world in the Top500 ranking of the most powerful systems.
Japan wants the world's fastest supercomputer by 2018
Our world is in transition, with automation and digitization edging-out more humane forms of industrial labor. Some countries are actively pushing against that, but others, like Japan, are running head-first towards the future. The nation is believed to be pushing to build the world's fastest supercomputer in an attempt to revitalize its recent malaise. Reuters is reporting that officials will spend $173 million on a machine capable of achieving 130 petaflops and besting current world number one, China's Sunway TaihuLight.
China made the world's fastest supercomputer using its own chips
There's a new computing champion... and unlike past years, this one doesn't depend on any Western tech to crunch numbers. Top500 has declared that China's Sunway TaihuLight, a 40,960-node system powered entirely by Chinese processors (the 260-core ShenWei 26010), is the world's fastest supercomputer. And it's leading by a wide margin, too. At 93 petaflops of processing power, it's nearly three times more powerful than the previous record-setter, the 33.85-petaflop Tianhe-2.
US wants the world's fastest supercomputer by 2025
President Obama has signed an executive order demanding that the US build the world's fastest supercomputer by 2025. The National Strategic Computing Initiative has been implemented to get the country building an Exascale machine and not fall behind rival nations in the technological arms race. This supercomputer will be developed by arms of the federal government and then be harnessed to speed up research into a wide variety of topics. One example is that the hardware will be used to help NASA better understand turbulence for aircraft design, while another is to crunch the numbers for medical researchers.
Tianhe-2 supercomputer claims the lead in Top 500 list, thanks its 3.1 million processor cores
As predicted, Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-2 (also known as the Milky Way-2) has now been crowned the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Arriving years ahead of schedule, and packing 32,000 Xeon processors alongside 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors, the supercomputer can manage a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second (33.85 petaflops), double that of last year's king (and closest rival), the Titan. In this year's results, 80 percent of the Top 500 used Intel processors, while 67 percent had processors with eight or more cores -- as clock speeds stall, supercomputer development has now focused on processors running in parallel. Top 500 editor Jack Dongarra adds that "most of the features of the [Tianhe-2] system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part," meaning that you can expect to see more Chinese entrants (and possibly champions) over the next few years. For now, however, the US still claims the majority of the Top 500, with 253 top-ranking supercomputers.
Tianhe-2 may easily crush supercomputer speed record at 30.7 petaflops
Many suspect that China's Tianhe-2 could win the supercomputer speed wars, but there haven't been real numbers to back up that hunch. We now have some of those figures courtesy of Top 500's Jack Dongarra, and Tianhe-2 could well be the new leader -- by a gigantic margin. The cluster of Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips has benchmarked at 30.65 petaflops when using 90 percent of its nodes, giving it a 74 percent edge (!) over the 17.6-petaflop Titan. There's no guarantee that Tianhe-2 will hold the crown when the official Top 500 rankings appear on June 17th, but we don't see any upstart rivals on the horizon. It could be lonely at the top... for a while.
Titan supercomputer leads latest Top 500 list, newly-available Xeon Phi chip cracks top ten
The supercomputer formerly known as Jaguar recently got an upgrade that was significant enough to earn it a new moniker, and it turns out that was also enough for it to claim the top spot on the latest Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Now known as Titan, the Cray-developed supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory edged out the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia supercomputer for the number one position, reaching 17.59 Petaflops per second with the aid of 18,688 NVIDIA K20 GPUs and an equal number of AMD Opteron processors. As EE Times notes, however, the other big story with this list is the strong showing for Intel's new Xeon Phi co-processors, which have just starting shipping to customers and have already found their way into seven of the supercomputers on the list, including one in the top ten (the Stampede at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas). You can see how your favorite supercomputer did at the link below.
China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer could hit 100 petaflops in 2015, may have a race on its hands
China's supercomputer development is as much driven by national reputation as by military prowess and science; the country chose to build the Sunway BlueLight MPP with domestic chips knowing that it wouldn't get the absolute performance crown. It won't be quite so modest the next time around. China's National University of Defense Technology wants the Tianhe-2 supercomputer due in 2015 to crack an extremely high 100 petaflops, or five times faster than the record-setting Titan over in the US and a whopping 40 times faster than the Tianhe-1A. Before we hand the crown over, though, Top 500 supercomputer chart keeper Jack Dongarra notes to ITworld that China might have to sprint if it wants the symbolic title: the EU, Japan and US are all striving for the same benchmark, and they're not backing off anytime soon. The nation's trump card may have to be long-term plans for an exaflop-strength supercomputer by 2018, at which point we suspect the bragging will simmer down. For awhile.
IBM's water-cooled supercomputer saves energy and helps with your heating bill (video)
IBM's SuperMuc has had a good week. Not only has the three petaflop machine been listed as Europe's fastest supercomputer, but it's also apparently the first high performance computer that's entirely water-cooled. Rather than filling rooms with air conditioning units, water is piped around veins in each component, removing heat 4,000 times more efficiently than air. The hot water is then used to heat the buildings of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre where it lives, saving the facility $1.25 million per year. After the break we've got a video from Big Blue, unfortunately narrated by someone who's never learned how to pronounce the word "innovative."
NNSA Sequoia supercomputer takes worlds fastest title, prevents nuclear testing
Fujitsu's 10.51 petaflop K supercomputer is pretty fast, but does it pack enough computational oomph to stave off underground nuclear testing? Probably -- but the NNSA's new sixteen petaflop rig does it better. According to the National Nuclear Security Administration, a supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, dubbed Sequoia, is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet, clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops. "Sequoia will provide a more complete understanding of weapons performance, notably hydrodynamics and properties of materials at extreme pressure sand temperatures," says NNSA Director of Advanced Simulation and Computing Bob Meisner, explaining that supercomputer simulations will "support the effort to extend the life of aging weapons systems." Translation? Sequoia will help the NNSA keep the US' nuclear stockpile stable without resorting to nuclear testing, or put simply, more computational power, fewer explosions. We can't think of a better thing to do with 98,304 compute nodes, 1.6 million cores and 1.6 petabytes of memory spread across 96 racks -- can you? Check out the official press release after the break.
Behind Amazon's Silk browser lurks a really fast supercomputer
We were hardly shocked to see Fujitsu atop the most recent list of the world's fastest supercomputers, but perhaps more surprising is the fact that Amazon cracked the top 50, as well. Turns out, the company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers are powered by a Linux-based, 240-teraflop beast that boasts 17,024 cores, 66,000 GB of memory, and a ten gigabit Ethernet interconnect. That's good for 42nd place on Top 500's global rankings, and it's also good enough to power Silk, the browser you'll find on the Kindle Fire. But Amazon has a long way to go before catching up with the Fujitsu K, which recently cracked that vaunted ten petaflop barrier.
Intel's gettin' kinda heavy, it's got the power, gonna break your heart
Intel spent most of yesterday standing in the bar at the SC11 conference showing off the size of its computing prowess. Admittedly, it's on a roll; the Xeon E5 processor powers ten of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, and Intel chips as a whole are found inside 85 percent of all the machines on the list -- not to mention the E5's newly minted PCI Express 3.0 compatibility. The Santa Clara chip maker is also building a new Exascale lab at the Barcelona Computing Center, a ten petaflop "Stampede" machine at the Texas Advanced Computing center and several other machines for Government agencies like NASA. The Seattle shindig was a great excuse for Intel's Rajeeb Hazra to show off the new Knights Corner co-processor, built with a new Tri-Gate 3D 22nm process that packs 50 cores into one strip of silicon. In fact, the only thing Intel wasn't bragging about was being bested by the record breaking Fujitsu K, the mere mention of which caused everyone to go a little bit too quiet and begin to glower (we assume).
Fujitsu's 10.51 petaflop K supercomputer is fastest in the world
Fujitsu, sweaty palmed from the construction of the K supercomputer, swore the colossal machine would manage a speed of ten petaflops by the year 2012. The effort has paid off handsomely: the hangar-sized machine has a top speed of 10.51. If you wanted to duplicate that setup at home, you'd only need 864 racks, 88,128 processors and enough cash in your back pocket to front an annual electricity bill of $10 million a year. The company will be spilling all at November's SC11 conference in Seattle, where the K will cement its position as the fastest computer in the world. One last thing -- we have a hunch that this machine can just about play Crysis.
China debuts homegrown supercomputer, hits one petaflop mark
China has already, however briefly, sat atop the Top500 list of supercomputers, but that was using silicon designed by American companies like Intel and NVIDIA. The country's latest contestant though, is sure to be a much bigger point of national pride. The Sunway BlueLight MPP, which was installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan this September, is powered by 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 CPUs -- the homegrown chips that come out of Shanghai. The Sunway's one petaflop performance isn't enough to make it the new king of the hill, but it should get it into the top 20. More impressively, the machine only consumes about one megawatt of electricity -- roughly a quarter of the 2.5 petaflop Tianhe-1A. Now it's up to researchers to crank these ShenWei cores up to a 11 and make a run at that 50 petaflop Cray.
Fujitsu K supercomputer now ranked fastest in the world, dethrones China's Tianhe-1A
Remember the K -- the Fujitsu supercomputer that promised to do a whopping ten petaflops by the year 2012? Well, it hasn't reached that threshold just yet, but according to the latest Top 500 supercomputer list, it's still faster than any other machine on Earth. In fact, the top-ranked beast is more powerful than the next five supercomputers combined, consumes enough electricity to power about 10,000 homes for a full year, and is capable of churning out about 8.2 quadrillion calculations per second -- three times as many as what runner-up (and former number-one) Tianhe-1A can process. Today's announcement marks the first time since 2004 that a Japanese creation sits atop Top500.org's rankings, but Fujitsu isn't exactly resting on its laurels. Before deploying it next year, engineers at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science are aiming to add about 100,000 cores to the K's collection of 548,352, which would provide it with even more computational muscle, and likely spell doom for all of humanity. Find out more in the PR after the break.
Cray Jaguar leaps past IBM Roadrunner as world's fastest supercomputer and pun generator (video)
Cray has finally clawed IBM back from the lead position on the Top500 Supercomputer chip-measuring contest. After just missing out on the title to IBM's Roadrunner last year, Cray's XT5 supercomputer (aka, Jaguar) at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee received an update from quad- to six-core Opteron processors to boast a 2.3 petaflop per second performance peak (theoretical) and 1.75 petaflops as measured by the Linpack benchmark; a feat requiring almost a quarter million AMD cores. IBM's Roadrunner, the very first supercomputer to race past the petaflop per second threshold, managed just 1.042 petaflops by comparison. Remember, one petaflop per second is equivalent to one quadrillion calculations per second. Of course, chip makers put their own spins on the list by noting that 4 of the top 5 systems depend on AMD for performance while Intel can be found powering 402 of the Top500. Video of the AMD processor upgrade procedure can be found after the break.
Roadrunner beats Jaguar in TOP500 supercomputer rankings, cartoon antics strangely absent
While titles like "world's fastest" and "world's largest" are fleeting at best, it's rare that we see such things taken down this quickly. Last week Cray delivered a big dish of braggadocio, talking up its 1.64 petaflop XT Jaguar supercomputer as the fastest (non-classified) machine in the world. Now, like some rocket skate-wearing coyote who's run out of thrust, it's been stymied by IBM's Roadrunner, deployed at Los Alamos. TOP500 is the authority on these matters and that list's latest rankings place Roadrunner in first place with a speed of 1.105 petaflops; Cray's Jag comes in second with a paltry 1.059. What about that 1.64 figure from last week? That was the hypothetical limit, and while it did deliver real-world performance of 1.3 petaflops for the folks at Oak Ridge, TOP500 relies on the Linpack benchmark for its ratings and apparently the Jag just couldn't deliver the goods there. Perhaps, Cray, it's time to make another call to ACME -- or AMD as it were.
IBM's BlueGene/L: world's fastest supercomputer, 3 years running
The TOP500 supercomputing list was just announced and IBM's BlueGene/L system has kept its crown. In fact, IBM's and the Department of Energy's co-developed monster at Lawrence Livermore has occupied the number 1 position since 2004. Of course, an upgrade was required boost the Linpack benchmark to 478.2 TFlop/s from the 280.6TFlop/s the machine was clocking just 6 months ago. The top 10 swath is dominated by the US, Sweden, and Germany with India breaking into the list for the first time at the number 4 position with its HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system measuring 102.8TFlop/s. [Via Impress]
BMW getting supercomputer; iDrive still sucks, though
BMW, one of the world's top auto makers, has decided that it needs an equivalent amount of horsepower for its supercomputers in its Switzerland development center, and thus struck a deal with Intel to purchase the Albert 2, a new supercomputer that works at 12.8 teraflops per second to help crunch numbers for the next generation of BMW engines and cars. That's not the fastest in the world, but it recently ranked 60th on the Top 500 supercomputer list -- a pretty respectable showing. But BMW and Intel are thinking bigger than just one supercomputer, as Intel will also get a huge sponsorship for BMW's Formula 1 cars (pictured), and in exchange the chipmaker will switch up every computer under BMW's roof to Intel-powered machines. Regardless of how fast the Albert 2 is, BMW is going to need to switch into fifth gear if it's really going to present the first Albert 2-designed F1 car, as planned, by January 16.P.S. -Some of us at Engadget do actually love iDrive. We're just playing around, BMW.[Thanks Terry B, via Heise]
Tyan Typhoon 600 series reaches 256 gigflops for "personal supercomputing"
Remember that 16-core Tyan Typhoon personal supercomputer we told you about back in March? Yeah, that was before all the dual-core and now quad-core action started flooding the market. Well, we've just laid our eyes on the Typhoon 600 series, which is loaded to the brim with Clovertown chips, reaching 256 gigaflops worth of processing power from a single outlet. Of course, the Typhoon isn't exactly going to crack the Top500 list of supercomputers, but it'll probably work much better than that those decked out quad-core getups we've seen thus far. If you really need that many chips, just be prepared not to flip out when you see the £10,000 ($19,080) pricetag, which works out to about 25,600,000 flops per pound sterling.
