For the fourth consecutive time, Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, has retained its position as the world’s No. 1 system with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark, according to the 44th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
In fact, there was little change among the ranking of the world’s top 10 supercomputers in the latest edition of the closely watched list. The only new entry was at number 10—a 3.57 petaflop/s Cray CS-Storm system installed at an undisclosed U.S. government site.
A detailed analysis of the latest TOP500 list will be presented Tuesday, Nov. 18, at the SC14 conference in New Orleans. At that time, the full list will also be published at TOP500.org.
Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems with 231, this number is down from 233 in June 2014 and down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The U.S. is nearing its historical low number on the list.
The number of European systems rose to 130, up from 116 last June, while the number of systems across Asia dropped from 132 to 120. The number of Chinese systems on the list also dropped, now at 61, compared to 76 in June 2014. Over the same period, Japan increased its number of systems from 30 to 32.
Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 309 Pflop/s, compared to 274 Pflop/s in June and 250 Pflop/s one year ago. This increase in installed performance also exhibits a noticeable slowdown in growth compared to the previous long-term trend.
There are 50 systems with performance greater than 1 petaflop/s on the list, up from 37 six months ago.
The No. 1 system, Tianhe-2, and the No. 7 system, Stampede, use Intel Xeon Phi processors to speed up their computational rate. The No. 2 system, Titan, and the No. 6 system, Piz Daint, use NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation.
A total of 75 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 62 from November 2013. Fifty of these use NVIDIA chips, three use ATI Radeon, and there are now 25 systems with Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi). Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (85.8 percent) of TOP500 systems.
Ninety-six percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores and 85 percent use eight or more cores.
HP has the lead in systems with 179 (36 percent) compared to IBM with 153 systems (30 percent). HP had 182 systems (36.4 percent) six months ago, and IBM had 176 systems (35.2 percent) six months ago. In the system category, Cray remains third with 62 systems (12.4 percent).
For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.