A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of computing performance compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). As of 2015, there are supercomputers which can perform up to quadrillions of FLOPS.
Lets take a look at some of the best supercomputers of the world.
#1 Sunway TaihuLight
The Sunway TaihuLight is a Chinese supercomputer which, as of November 2016, is ranked number one in the TOP500 list as the fastest supercomputer in the world, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. This is nearly three times as fast as the previous holder of the record, the Tianhe-2, which ran at 34 petaflops. As of June 2016, it is also ranked as the fourth most energy-efficient supercomputer in Green500, with an efficiency of 6,051.30 MFLOPS/W. It was designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi in the city of Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, China.
#2 Tianhe-2
Tianhe-2 or TH-2 is a 33.86-petaflop supercomputer located in National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.
It was the world's fastest supercomputer according to the TOP500 lists for June 2013, November 2013, June 2014, November 2014, June 2015, and November 2015.The record was surpassed in June 2016 by the Sunway TaihuLight. In 2015, plans of the Sun Yat-sen University in collaboration with Guangzhou district and city administration to double its computing capacities were stopped by a US government rejection of Intel's application for an export license for the CPUs and coprocessor boards.
#3 Titan
Titan is a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan is an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs). Titan is the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it became available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.
#4 Sequoia
IBM Sequoia is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). It was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2011 and was fully deployed in June 2012.
On June 14, 2012, the TOP500 Project Committee announced that Sequoia replaced the K computer as the world's fastest supercomputer, with a LINPACK performance of 17.17 petaflops, 63% faster than the K computer's 10.51 petaflops, having 123% more cores than the K computer's 705,024 cores. Sequoia is also more energy efficient, as it consumes 7.9 MW, 37% less than the K computer's 12.6 MW.
#5 Cori
Cori, the Cray XC40 system that is the latest addition to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC) supercomputing repertoire, is now fully installed and ready to support scientific simulations and data-intensive workflows.
Over the summer Cori’s two phases, which together comprise more than 10,000 compute nodes featuring Intel Haswell and Xeon Phi Knights Landing (KNL) processors, were fully integrated into Berkeley Lab’s new Shyh Wang Hall, which opened just over a year ago. Construction of Shyh Wang Hall, one of the nation’s most energy-efficient supercomputer facilities, was financed by the University of California, with the utility infrastructure and computer systems provided by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Over the summer Cori’s two phases, which together comprise more than 10,000 compute nodes featuring Intel Haswell and Xeon Phi Knights Landing (KNL) processors, were fully integrated into Berkeley Lab’s new Shyh Wang Hall, which opened just over a year ago. Construction of Shyh Wang Hall, one of the nation’s most energy-efficient supercomputer facilities, was financed by the University of California, with the utility infrastructure and computer systems provided by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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