June 2013 – Today: Tianhe-2
With the Tianhe-2, a machine capable of performing more than 33 quadrillion calculations per second at launch, China once again took the top spot from the US and, so far, has managed to hold onto it. Deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, it is the successor to the Tianhe-1.
The Tianhe-2, otherwise known as the Milky Way 2, has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon E5 Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi 31SP co-processors, for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores. This architecture allows it to carry out a massive number of operations in parallel, although reportedly makes it more difficult to write code for. Combined with 1,024,000 GB (~1PB) of memory, the machine’s theoretical peak performance is 54,902.4 TFlop/s. Its power draw is a whopping 17,808 kW and it runs Kylin Linux and uses TH Express-2 interconnects.
Image: Jack Dongarra
Source: http://www.techrepublic.com