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posted by janrinok on Monday July 13 2015, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-does-it-run...-OK,-you've-heard-it-before dept.

The TOP500 List of the world's fastest supercomputers for June 2015 has been released. China's Tianhe-2 remains the leader with 33.86 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark. It has topped the list since June 2013. The only new supercomputer in the top 10 is the Shaheen II in Saudi Arabia, a 5.536 PFlop/s Cray XC40 system using 196,608 Intel Xeon E5-2698v3 cores.

The Platform has an analysis of the results. Although performance growth is slowing, pre-exascale supercomputers (100+ petaflops) can be expected within the next two to three years. The U.S. Department of Energy's Aurora supercomputer will deliver 180 petaflops of performance in 2018. Around the same time, the Summit supercomputer is expected to reach 150-300 petaflops while Sierra will reach 100+ petaflops. ~1 exaflop supercomputers are expected to appear around 2018-2022.

The June 2015 Green500 list ranking supercomputers by megaflops per watt will be available sometime later in the month. Here is the November 2014 Green500 list. The Piz Daint supercomputer appears within the top 10 on both lists.

Stats from the press release:

Although the United States remains the top country in terms of overall systems with 233, up from 231 six months ago and the same as in June 2014 and down from 265 on the November 2013 list. The U.S. is nearing its historical low number on the list. The number of European systems rose to 141, up from 130 on the last list, while the number of systems across Asia dropped to 108 from 120. The number of Chinese systems on the list also dropped to 37, compared to 61 last November, China has only half as many systems on the newest list as it did one year ago. Japan continues to increase its count on the list, claiming 39 spots this time, up from 32 last November. However, China's role in high performance computing is increasing in the manufacturing arena, with Lenovo now being counted among the vendors of systems on the TOP500 list. 3 new systems are solely attributed to Lenovo, while 20 systems previously listed as IBM are now labeled jointly between IBM and Lenovo.

Cray Inc., a company long associated with supercomputers, is on a resurgence and emerges in the latest list as the clear leader in performance, claiming a 24 percent share of installed total performance (up from 18.2 percent). IBM takes the second spot with a 22.2 percent share, down from 28 percent last November. On the latest edition of the list, the No. 500 system recorded a performance of 153.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second, 133.7 teraflop/s six months ago. The last system on the newest list was listed at position 421 in the previous TOP500. This represents the lowest turnover rate in the list in two decades.

  • Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 363 Pflop/s, compared to 309 Pflop/s last November and 274 Pflop/s one year ago. This increase in installed performance also exhibits a noticeable slowdown in growth compared to the previous long-term trend.
  • There are 68 systems with performance greater than 1 petaflop/s on the list, up from 50 last November.
  • A total of 88 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 75 on November 2014. Fifty-two (52) of these use NVIDIA chips, four use ATI Radeon, and there are now 33 systems with Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi). Four systems use a combination of Nvidia and Intel Xeon Phi accelerators/co-processors.
  • HP has the lead in the total number of systems with 178 (35.6 percent) compared to IBM with 111 systems (22.2 percent). Last November, HP had 179 systems and IBM had 153 systems. In the system category, Cray remains third with 71 systems (14.2 percent).

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