Supercomputers

Top 10 Supercomputers in 2016

What is a Supercomputer?

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of computational capacity compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). As of 2015, there are supercomputers which can perform up to quadrillions of FLOPS.

Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, made initially, and for decades primarily, by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear and, by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of off-the-shelf processors were the norm.

As of June 2016, the fastest supercomputer in the world is the Sunway TaihuLight, in mainland China, with a Linpack benchmark of 93 PFLOPS (P=peta), exceeding the previous record holder, Tianhe-2, by around 59 PFLOPS. It tops the rankings in the TOP500 supercomputer list. Sunway TaihuLight's emergence is also notable for its use of indigenous chips, and is the first Chinese computer to enter the TOP500 list without using hardware from the United States. As of June 2016, China, for the first time, had more computers (167) on the TOP500 list than the United States (165). However, U.S. built computers held ten of the top 20 positions.

Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion). Throughout their history, they have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis.

Here is the list of Top 10 Supercomputers in World till 2016:

1. Sunway TaihuLight – China

Processor: SW26010 | Vendor: NRCPC | Operating System: Linux (Raise) |

Total CPU Cores: 10,649,600

The Sunway TaihuLight is a Chinese supercomputer which, as of June 2016, is ranked number one in the TOP500 list as the fastest supercomputer in the world, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. This is nearly three times as fast as the previous holder of the record, the Tianhe-2, which ran at 34 petaflops. As of June 2016, it is also ranked as the third most energy-efficient supercomputer in TOP500, with an efficiency of 6,051.30 MFLOPS/W. It was designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi in the city of Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, China.

The Sunway TaihuLight uses a total of 40,960 Chinese-designed SW26010 manycore 64-bit RISC processors based on the Sunway architecture.Each processor chip contains 256 processing cores, and an additional four auxiliary cores for system management (also RISC cores, just more fully featured) for a total of 10,649,600 CPU cores across the entire system.

The processing cores feature 64 KB of scratchpad memory for data (and 16 KB for instructions) and communicate via a network on a chip, instead of having a traditional cache hierarchy.

The system runs on its own operating system, Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5, which is based on Linux. The system has its own customized implementation of OpenACC 2.0 to aid the parallelization of code.

2. Tianhe-2 – China

Processor: Xeon E5–2692, Xeon Phi 31S1P | Vendor: NUDT | Operating System: Linux (Kylin) |Total CPU Cores: 3,120,000

Tianhe-2 or TH-2 is a 33.86-petaflop supercomputer located in National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.

It was the world's fastest supercomputer according to the TOP500 lists for June 2013, November 2013, June 2014, November 2014, June 2015, and November 2015. The record was surpassed in June 2016 by the Sunway TaihuLight. In 2015, plans of the Sun Yat-sen University in collaboration with Guangzhou district and city administration to double its computing capacities were stopped by a US government rejection of Intel's application for an export license for the CPUs and coprocessor boards.

In response to the US sanction, China introduced the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in 2016, which substantially outperforms the Tianhe-2, and now holds the title as the fastest supercomputer in the world while using completely domestic technology including the Sunway multicore microprocessor.

With 16,000 computer nodes, each comprising two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi coprocessor chips, it represented the world's largest installation of Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips, counting a total of 3,120,000 cores. Each of the 16,000 nodes possessed 88 gigabytes of memory (64 used by the Ivy Bridge processors, and 8 gigabytes for each of the Xeon Phi processors). The total CPU plus coprocessor memory was 1,375 TiB (approximately 1.34 PiB). The system has a 12.4 PiB H2FS file system consisting of IO forwarding nodes providing a 1 TiB/s burst rate backed by a Lustre file system with 100 GiB/s sustained throughput.

3. Titan – United States

Processor: Opteron 6274, Tesla K20X | Vendor: Cray | Operating System: Linux (CLE, SLES based) |Total CPU Cores: 299,008

Titan is a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan is an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs). Titan is the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it became available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.

Titan is due to be eclipsed at Oak Ridge by Summit in 2018, which is being built by IBM and features fewer nodes with much greater GPU capability per node as well as local per-node non-volatile caching of file data from the system's parallel file system.

Titan employs AMD Opteron CPUs in conjunction with Nvidia Tesla GPUs to improve energy efficiency while providing an order of magnitude increase in computational power over Jaguar. It uses 18,688 CPUs paired with an equal number of GPUs to perform at a theoretical peak of 27 petaFLOPS; in the LINPACK benchmark used to rank supercomputers' speed, it performed at 17.59 petaFLOPS. This was enough to take first place in the November 2012 list by the TOP500 organization, but Tianhe-2 overtook it on the June 2013 list.

Titan is available for any scientific purpose; access depends on the importance of the project and its potential to exploit the hybrid architecture. Any selected code must also be executable on other supercomputers to avoid sole dependence on Titan. Six vanguard codes were the first selected. They dealt mostly with molecular scale physics or climate models, while 25 others queued behind them. The inclusion of GPUs compelled authors to alter their codes. The modifications typically increased the degree of parallelism, given that GPUs offer many more simultaneous threads than CPUs. The changes often yield greater performance even on CPU-only machines.

4. Sequoia – United States

Processor: PowerPC A2| Vendor: IBM | Operating System: Linux (RHEL and CNK) |Total CPU Cores: 1,572,864

IBM Sequoia is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). It was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2011 and was fully deployed in June 2012.

On June 14, 2012, the TOP500 Project Committee announced that Sequoia replaced the K computer as the world's fastest supercomputer, with a LINPACK performance of 16.32 petaflops, 55% faster than the K computer's 10.51 petaflops, having 123% more cores than the K computer's 705,024 cores. Sequoia is also more energy efficient, as it consumes 7.9 MW, 37% less than the K computer's 12.6 MW.

As of June 17, 2013, Sequoia had dropped to #3 on the TOP500 ranking, behind Tianhe-2 and Titan. In June 2016, it slipped again, to fourth place on the TOP500 ranking.

Record-breaking science applications have been run on Sequoia, the first to cross 10 petaflops of sustained performance. The cosmology simulation framework HACC achieved almost 14 petaflops with a 3.6 trillion particle benchmark run, while the Cardioid code, which models the electrophysiology of the human heart, achieved nearly 12 petaflops with a near real-time simulation.

The entire supercomputer runs on Linux, with CNK running on over 98,000 nodes, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on 768 I/O nodes that are connected to the Lustre filesystem.

5. Cori – United States

Processor: Xeon Phi 7250 | Vendor: Cray | Operating System: Linux (CLE)|

Total CPU Cores: 632,672

Cori is NERSC's newest supercomputer (NERSC-8), a Cray XC40. It is named for American biochemist Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first woman to be so honored with the prize in Physiology or Medicine.   Cori is a unique supercomputer, comprised of 2,004 Intel Xeon "Haswell" processor nodes, 9,300 Intel Xeon Phi "Knight's Landing" nodes, and a 1.5 PB Cray Data Warp Burst Buffer.

NERSC's newest supercomputer, named Cori, currently has Phase I (the Haswell partition) installed.  Cori Phase I has a (theoretical) peak performance of 1.92 petaflops/sec, 52,160 compute cores for running scientific applications, 203 terabytes of memory, and 28 petabytes of online disk storage with a peak I/O bandwidth of > 700 gigabytes (GB) per second.

The cabinets of the Cori Phase II system (the Knights Landing partition) arrived in July 2016, and integration with the Phase I system began in September 2016.

6. Oakforest-PACS – Japan

Processor: Xeon Phi 7250| Vendor: Fujitsu| Operating System: Linux |

Total CPU Cores: 556,104

The University of Tokyo, the University of Tsukuba, and Fujitsu Limited today announced that the Oakforest-PACS massively parallel cluster-type supercomputer, built by Fujitsu and operated by the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC), has achieved a LINPACK performance result of 13.55 petaflops, as ranked in the November Top500 list for supercomputer performance. Given this, Oakforest-PACS has surpassed the K computer to officially become the highest performance supercomputer in Japan. The system's peak performance is 25 petaflops, which is about 2.2 times that of the K computer.

The Oakforest-PACS system is located in the Information Technology Center on the University of Tokyo's Kashiwa Campus, but everything is carried out jointly by the University of Tokyo and the University of Tsukuba, including financing, implementation and operation of the system, as well as the majority of program usage. The system is made up of 8,208 computational nodes using Intel Xeon Phi high performance processors with Knights Landing architecture that uses many-core processor technology.

 The nodes are connected by Intel® Omni-Path Architecture. Because of the progress in semiconductor and interconnect technology over the past five years, the system, which uses commercially available processors, has been able to achieve the highest level of performance in Japan.

7. K computer – Japan

Processor: SPARC64 VIIIfx | Vendor: Fujitsu| Operating System: Linux |

Total CPU Cores: 705,024

The K computer – named for the Japanese word "kei" meaning 10 quadrillion (10¹⁶) is a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, currently installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. The K computer is based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 computer nodes. It is used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. The K computer's operating system is based on the Linux kernel, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware.

In June 2011, TOP500 ranked K the world's fastest supercomputer, with a computation speed of over 8 petaflops, and in November 2011, K became the first computer to top 10 petaflops. It had originally been slated for completion in June 2012. In June 2012, K was superseded as the world's fastest supercomputer by the American IBM Sequoia and as of August 2016, K is the world's fifth-fastest computer.

8. Piz Daint – Switzerland

Processor: Xeon E5-2690v3, Tesla P100 | Vendor: Cray| Operating System: Linux (CLE) |Total CPU Cores: 45,216

Named after Piz Daint, a prominent peak in Grisons that overlooks the Fuorn pass, this supercomputer is a Cray XC30 system and is the flagship system for national HPC Service.

Piz Daint has a computing power of 7.8 PFlops, this means 7.8 quadrillion of mathematical operations per second. Piz Daint can compute in one day more than a modern laptop could compute in 900 years.

This supercomputer is a 28 cabinet Cray XC30 system with a total of 5'272 compute nodes. The compute nodes are equipped with an 8-core 64-bit Intel SandyBridge CPU (Intel® Xeon® E5-2670), an NVIDIA® Tesla® K20X with 6 GB GDDR5 memory, and 32 GB of host memory. The nodes are connected by the "Aries" proprietary interconnect from Cray, with a dragonfly network topology.

9. Mira – United States

Processor: PowerPC A2 | Vendor: IBM | Operating System: Linux (CNK)|

Total CPU Cores: 786,432

Mira is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. As of June 2013, it is listed on TOP500 as the fifth-fastest supercomputer in the world. It has a performance of 8.59 petaflops (LINPACK) and consumes 3.9 MW. The supercomputer was constructed by IBM for Argonne National Laboratory's Argonne Leadership Computing Facility with the support of the United States Department of Energy, and partially funded by the National Science Foundation. Mira will be used for scientific research, including studies in the fields of material science, climatology, seismology, and computational chemistry. The supercomputer is being utilized initially for sixteen projects, selected by the Department of Energy.

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which commissioned the supercomputer, was established by the America COMPETES Act, signed by President Bush in 2007, and President Obama in 2011.The United States' emphasis on supercomputing has been seen as a response to China's progress in the field. China's Tianhe-1A, located at the Tianjin National Supercomputer Center, was ranked the most powerful supercomputer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011.Mira is, along with IBM Sequoia and Blue Waters, one of three American petascale supercomputers deployed in 2012. The cost for building Mira has not been released by IBM. Early reports estimated that construction would cost US$50 million, and Argonne National Laboratory announced that Mira was bought using money from a grant of US$180 million. In a press release, IBM marketed the supercomputer's speed, claiming that "if every man, woman and child in the United States performed one calculation each second, it would take them almost a year to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second"

10. Trinity – United States

Processor: Xeon E5–2698v3 | Vendor: Cray | Operating System: Linux (CLE) |Total CPU Cores: 68,138

The Trinity supercomputer is provided by Cray, Inc. and is based on its XC30 platform architecture. Trinity is a mixture of Intel Haswell and Knights Landing (KNL) processors. The Haswell partition provides a natural transition path for many of the legacy codes running on the Cielo supercomputer, Trinity’s predecessor. In order to effectively use the KNL processor to its full potential, the ASC code teams to must expose higher levels of thread- and vector-level parallelism than has been necessary for the traditional multicore architectures. To help facilitate this transition, the Trinity Center of Excellence was established, with staff from the ASC tri-Labs, Cray, and Intel.

Trinity introduces tightly integrated nonvolatile “burst buffer” storage capabilities. Embedded within the high-speed fabric are nodes with attached solid-state disk drives. The burst buffer capability will allow for accelerated checkpoint/restart performance and relieve much of the pressure normally loaded on the back-end storage arrays. In addition, the burst buffer will support novel new workload management strategies such as in-situ analysis, which opens a whole space in which projects can manage their overall workflows.

Trinity also introduces advanced power management functionality that allows monitoring and control of power consumption at the system, application, and component levels. Although advanced power management is not needed for the current power and operational budget, its functionality is being used to gain a better understanding for future system requirements and features.