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TOP500 Supercomputer List for November 2015 Released, China Dominates

Accepted submission by takyon at 2015-11-16 19:30:34
Hardware

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The 46th edition of the TOP500 list [top500.org] of supercomputers has been released. While the familiar Tianhe-2 continues to lead the list with a performance of 33.86 petaflops, China has nearly tripled its representation within the top 500 systems, to 109 supercomputers today from just 37 in June. The United States has 200 systems on the list, down from 231 in June and the country's lowest share since the list was first published in 1993.

There are two new entrants within the top 10 systems. The U.S. Department of Energy's unfinished Trinity supercomputer debuts at #6 with a LINPACK of 8.1 petaflops. Trinity's performance is expected to grow [nextplatform.com] to around 42.2 peak petaflops once Intel's Knights Landing Xeon Phi coprocessors are added in 2016. University of Stuttgart's High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart [www.hlrs.de] (HLRS) has doubled the performance of Hazel-Hen [www.hlrs.de]. It is now a 5.6 petaflops system that reaches #8 on the list and is Germany's most powerful supercomputer, edging out the 5 petaflops JUQUEEN [top500.org] ranked at #11. Trinity and Hazel-Hen are both Cray XC systems, reflecting a recent resurgence in Cray Inc.'s representation on the list (now with a 24.9% share of total installed performance).

Here are some more trends from the current list:

  • Today's #500 system has a performance of 204.3 teraflops (164 teraflops in June).
  • Total combined performance of all 500 systems has reached 420 petaflops (361 petaflops in June, 309 petaflops one year ago).
  • 80 systems on the list have reached 1 petaflops or greater performance (67 systems in June).
  • 104 systems use accelerators or coprocessors, such as NVIDIA GPUs and Xeon Phi "manycore" chips (90 in June).
  • Chinese vendor Sugon now beats IBM in system share, 49-45, although 14 systems not counted are labeled either IBM/Lenovo and Lenovo/IBM. Sugon had just 5 systems on the June 2015 list. Many of the Sugon systems appear to be from commercial telecom and Internet customers, and are ranked closer to the bottom of the list.

TOP500 also published interviews this week with TOP500 "co-authors" Horst Simon [top500.org] and Jack Dongarra [top500.org]. The Next Platform (formerly The Platform) has coverage [nextplatform.com] and analysis [nextplatform.com] of the list.

Original Submission