http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32247532

The Chinese have a supa-dupa-computer called the Tianhe-2. It is already the world’s biggest supercomputer (according to Top 500, an organisation that monitors supercomputers) and the world’s most powerful machine for the past 18 months. Even so, the Chinese wanted to upgrade it, but the USA government has said ‘No’.

Are you ready for lots & lots of computer gobble-de-gook about stuff that you didn’t even know existed? Well, here we go...

The computer that I’m writing this on has a single intel ‘Pentium D’ cpu (‘central processing unit’) with 2 cores. So, just 1 cpu but it acts like there are 2 cpu in the system.

The Tianhe-2 has slightly more computing power than my home machine. It has:-

• 16,000 computer nodes
  
  each node has:-
  • 2 x Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon E5-2692v2 12C 2.2GHz cpu (general purpose processor)
  • 3 x intel Xeon Phi coprocessor chips
  • 64 gigabytes of memory shared between the 2 Ivy Bridge cpu
  • 8 gigabytes of memory for each of the Xeon Phi cpu
  • (thus: 80,000 total cpu)
  • (thus: 88GB total memory per node)
• 3,120,000 total cores
• 54.9 petaflops peak performance
  (1 petaflop = approx 1 quadrillion calculations per second)
  (1 quadrillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000) (one thousand million million) (10¹⁵)
• 1,408 terabyte (1.408 petabyte) total memory
• Kylin Linux OS
• 17.8 megawatts (peak power)
  (24 megawatts including external cooling)
• 720m² total space

The above all looks impressive, but we then need to add in that the front-end system utilises 4,096 Galaxy FT-1500 cpu, each of which has 16 cores and a 1.8 GHz clock frequency. These alone are 144 gigaflops, 65 watts!

The Tianhe-2 was originally scheduled for completion in 2015 but actually became operational in 2013. It was immediately declared the ‘fastest supercomputer’ and, indeed, twice as fast as the number-2 supercomputer, Titan. On the HPL Linpack benchmark:

1. Tianhe-2 (National University of Defense Technology (NUDT)): 33.86 petaflops
2. Titan ( U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory): 17.59 petaflops

The USA houses 252 of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, whilst China hosts just 66.

This month, intel applied to the Department of Commerce for a license to export 80,000 upgraded cpu for the Tianhe-2 + three other supercomputers. The license was declined, as the NUDT computer is involved in the ‘design, development or fabrication of nuclear weapons’. However, intel has signed a deal with the Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois to build the Aurora supercomputer, which is expected to have a peak performance of 180 petaflops.

Hmm. Yah boo sucks, huh?

For reference:-

• kilo: 1,000 (one thousand) (10³)
• mega: 1,000,000 (one million) (10⁶)
• giga: 1,000,000,000 (one thousand million) (10⁹)
• tera: 1,000,000,000,000 (one million million) (10¹²)
• peta: 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one thousand million million) (10¹⁵)

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Alex Kemp