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Backgrounder: More about new TOP 500 supercomputers

Xinhua, June 20, 2016 Adjust font size:

The TOP 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was updated on Monday with a new Chinese supercomputer called Sunway TaihuLight on the top, replacing its precedent Tianhe-2.

The list, updated every half a year, is compiled on the basis of the machines' performance on the Linpack benchmark by experts from the United States and Germany.

The following are more facts about the new born TOP 500 list.

The No. 1 spot, Sunway TaihuLight, can perform 93 quadrillion calculations per second, or petaflop/s. With 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes, it is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2, which has a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s.

Moreover, unlike the China-made Tianhe-2, which is an Intel-based system and claimed the No. 1 in the past six lists, Sunway TaihuLight entirely uses processors designed and made in China.

Compared to the last list, China, with 167 systems, rose to home of the largest number of supercomputers, 58 more than half a year ago, whereas the United States, with the amount of systems fell from 199 to 165, ranked the second. It is the first time that the U.S. leading position has been replaced by another country since the inception of the list in 1993.

With the No. 1 and No. 2 computers both coming from China, the Asian power also leads the best performance category in the latest list.

In terms of producing capability of companies making these super systems, the America-based Hewlett-Packard Development Company (HP) manufactured the most systems of 127 supercomputers, while Chinese Lenovo followed with a production of 84, which is 59 more than that in the last list.

The other three rounding out the top five supercomputer producers in order are Washington-based Cray Incorporation, which produced 60 systems in the list, Chinese Sugon Information Industry Cooperation with 51 systems, and IBM with 38 systems.

When it comes to the processor, Inter processor was applied by 455 supercomputers, while 23 systems used IBM-made processor and 13 others applied Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) brand.

If all the calculation capability of the TOP 500 put together, the newest 500 fastest supercomputers can perform 566.7 petaflop/s in total, while half a year ago, the record was 420 petaflop/s, and 363 petaflop/s a year ago. Endi