According with the latest Top500, which is updated twice a year, Tianhe-2 ("Galaxy-2") offers 33,86 petaflops power, meaning it can run 33,6 four million floating point calculations per second. From the previous version of Top500 to date , China has managed to increase its supercomputers that are listed by 63 on 76 - just like Britain (30), France (27) and Germany (23) together. The US saw their share dropping by 15 %, but they are still very first with 233 systems on the list manufacturers, HP comes first with 182 systems, followed by IBM with 176 and Cray with 51. The champion Tianhe-2 operates at the Guançu National Computer Center and is used in research and education programs. It uses a combination of Galaxy Ft-1500 processors designed at Intel's Ivy Bridge and Xenon Phi processors and runs the Linux-based Kylin operating system, designed specifically for high-end applications.
Tianhe-2's demands on electricity are monstrous, since consumption reaches 17,8 Megawatt as much as a small town needs.
High power consumption was also the reason why 2013 was dropped by IBM's Roadrunner, the system that broke the 1 pflops barrier for the first time five years ago.
The second place of the latest Top500, published by his team, Professor Hans Morner, at the University of Mannheim, Germany, is again the Titan (17,59 pflos), a Cray system operating at the National Laboratory of Oak Ridge, which is part of the US Department of Defense.
Top500's performance is measured by the so-called Linpack test, which scores computers for the speed of execution of a specific linear equation. However, it does not take into account other factors that affect speed in real-world conditions, such as the rate of data transmission from one part of the system to another.
The latest version of Top500 will be presented later on Monday at the International Computer Conference held in Leipzig, Germany.
