Supercomputer

The 36th edition of the closely watched TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers confirms the rumored takeover of the top spot by the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, achieving a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second).

News of the Chinese system’s performance emerged in late October. As a result, the former number one system — the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee — is now ranked in second place. Jaguar achieved 1.75 petaflop/s running Linpack, the TOP500 benchmark application.

Third place is now held by a Chinese system called Nebulae, which was also knocked down one spot from the June 2010 TOP500 list with the appearance of Tianhe-1A. Located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, Nebulae performed at 1.27 petaflop/s. Rounding out the Top Five slots are two new systems: Tsubame 2.0 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology at number four; and Hopper, a Cray XE6 system at DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center in California in the fifth spot. Tsubame achieved a performance of 1.19 petaflop/s, while Hopper just broke the petaflop/s barrier with 1.05 petaflop/s.

Of the Top 10 systems, seven achieved performance at or above 1 petaflop/s. Five of the systems in the Top 10 are new to the list. Of the Top 10, five are in the United States and the others are in China, Japan, France, and Germany. The most powerful system in Europe is a Bull system at the French CEA (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives or Atomic and Alternative Energies Commission), ranked at number six.