If you thought your PC was fast, wait until you see what Tianhe-1A can do: the Intel and Nvidia-powered supercomputer can do in a day what a dual-core personal computer would take 160 years to complete. It’s a serious bit of kit, and it’s not the only supercomputer with more cores than we’ve had hot dinners.
10. The one keeping nukes safe: Cielo
Cielo is used for “classified operations” by the US National Nuclear Security Administration, and it’s getting a big upgrade this year: its 6,704 computing nodes will be upped to 9,000, and its memory will go from 221.5TB to around 300TB.
9. The ultimate DVD ripper: JUGENE
Germany’s supercomputer was designed for low power consumption as well as high performance, and it’s been involved in some interesting projects – including trying to work out how DVDs work.
8. The answer to life, the universe and everything: Kraken
Kraken is best suited to jobs that use “at least 512 cores”. It’s got plenty to spare: the National Institute for Computational Sciences reports that the Cray supercomputer has 112,895 compute cores spread across 9,408 nodes.
7. The former champion: Roadrunner
In 2008 it was the first supercomputer to crack the petaflop barrier for sustained performance, but its 1.04 petaflop speed means it fell to seventh place in just two years. Built by IBM for the US Department of Energy, it was designed to work out whether the US’s nuclear weapons would remain safe as they age – although like most supercomputers it’s also available to industry, with car and aerospace industries paying for a go.
6. The French one: Tera-100
Built around Intel Xeon 7500 processors, the successor to 2005′s Tera 10 is 20 times faster and seven times more energy efficient as its predecessor. It’s another nuclear one: Tera-100′s mission is to help guarantee the reliability of Europe’s nukes.
5. The planet-saver: Hopper
Hopper is working on the big stuff: climate change, clean energy, astrophysics, particle physics… its home, the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, offers its services to more than 3,000 researchers in the fields of climate research, chemistry, new material development and other crucial fields.
4. The one with the rubbish name: TSUBAME 2.0
Tokyo’s TSUBAME 2.0 offers similar performance to Jaguar – it peaks at 2.3 petaflops, with sustained performance of around 1.4 petaflops – but it’s one-quarter of the size and uses one-quarter of the power thanks to its heavy reliance on Nvidia Fermi GPUs as well as Intel CPUs.
3. The other slightly mysterious Chinese one: Dawning Nebulae
When it launched in early 2010 the Chinese Dawning Nebulae supercomputer was the world’s fastest, with performance of 1.27 petaflops, but it’s already in third place thanks to Jaguar and China’s own newer, faster Tianhe-1A. Like its sibling Nebulae is in the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen.
2. The one with a quarter of a million cores: Jaguar
Jaguar’s 224,162 cores come courtesy of a whole bunch of six-core Opteron chips, and its performance is a hefty 1.76 petaflops. Oak Ridge says it’s the world’s fastest supercomputer for unclassified research.
1. The slightly mysterious Chinese one: Tianhe-1A
China’s supercomputer is currently the world’s fastest: it can run at a sustained 2.5 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) thanks to its 186,368 cores and 229,376GB of RAM.
Source:top10diary