The list for the Top 500 supercomputers in the world is updated twice a year, and it used to be an extremely exciting race, but in recent times, it starts to hark back to a period of domination by one particular nation, making it a whole lot more predictable as competition grows stagnant. The Chinese National University of Defense Technology’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer once again sits right at the top of the list for the 4th straight time.
Of course, others are playing catch up since the performance gap between the Tianhe-2 and the rest of its competitors has lessened, which ought to make future readings more interesting, although we do seem to have fallen into a rather routine and predictable pattern at the moment. A Linpack benchmark saw the Tianhe-2 deliver 33.86 petaflop/s of computing power, and just in case you were wondering, a petaflop is the equivalent of one quadrillion floating point operations.
The top 10 list saw a new entry, which is a Cray creation for an anonymous U.S government agency that managed to deliver 3.57 metaflop/s. It seems that things might change in 2017, as Tennessee could then host the world’s fastest supercomputer by that time, so we will wait and see.
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