Tianhe-2 takes fastest supercomputer crown
China's Tianhe-2 has topped the latest list of the fastest 500 supercomputers, with a performance of 33.86petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.
Developed by the National University of Defence Technology, Tianhe-2, or Milky Way-2, has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores.
Its surprise appearance, two years ahead of its expected deployment, marks China's first return to the number one position since November 2010, when Tianhe-1A took the title.
Tianhe-2 seized the number one ranking from Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer, which achieved 17.59petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 261,632 of its NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.
