China has developed the fastest supercomputer in the world, recording twice the speed of the US supercomputer Titan, which held the title previously.
Nonetheless, the U.S. still remains the leader in supercomputer systems overall, with more than half of the systems in the list. China is in the second position and has 66, ahead of Japan, UK, France, and Germany, which has 30, 29, 23, and 19 respectively.
According to TOP500, a project that ranks the 500 most powerful computers in the world, Tianhe-2 or Milky Way-2 is the world's new, No. 1 system. Tianhe-2, developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, has a speed of 33.86 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark, compared with 17.59 petaflop/s achieved by Titan.
Tianhe-2 marks China's return to the No. 1 position in TOP500 list since November 2010, when Tianhe-1A was on top. 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.
Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been pushed back to the second spot in the list. Titan has 261,632 NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.
Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, dropped to the third position. Sequoia has achieved 17.17 petaflop/s using 1,572,864 cores.
Fujitsu's "K computer" installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, came in as No. 4, while a second BlueGene/Q system, Mira, installed at Argonne National Laboratory is in the No.5 position.
TOP500, the project that was started in 1993, publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year.
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