China’s Tianhe-2 Remains World’s Fastest Supercomputer

With a performance of 33.86 petaflops per second (Pflops/s), China’s Tianhe-2 is the world’s fastest computer for the second year in a row. According to the Top500 announcement of the semi-annual list of supercomputers in the world.

The Tianhe-2 was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology in collaboration with the Chinese IT company Inspur.Its predecessor, the Tianhe-1A, takes No. 1 ranking on the supercomputer list in November 2010.

“Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part. That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese,” said Jack Dongarra, one of TOP500 editors.

Top 500 organizers note that there was little change among the ranking of the world’s top 10 supercomputers in the latest edition of the closely watched list, exception of a newest entry – a Cray system that has been installed at Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.

Although global competition is increasing, U.S.vendors account for 90% of all the systems on the Top500 list, with China ranks at the second.

The Top500 list is regarded as one of the most authoritative rankings of the world’s supercomputers. It is compiled on the basis of the machines’ performance on the Linpack benchmark by experts from the US and Germany.

(for more: BBC News)