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.
