Wednesday, May 29, 2013

China Pulls a Coupe, Builds 50 Petaflop Supercomputer: Tianhe-2

Yesterday, we took the plunge and reported on the pervasive rumor that a MIC-based Chinese system had been validated by Top 500 brass in person—proving dramatic LINPACK performance against the Titan and the rest of the leaders of the supercomputing pack.

There is currently a team from the Top500 in China and they have reported that they’ve examined the system and that indeed, it’s performance parallels the early reports.

This morning we’ve been able to confirm a number of details about the system, which for the sake of brevity, we’ll present here in rather short form. Before doing so, thanks to all of you who scurried around to send us emails late last night with confirmation, further details, and insight about the new top super.

The reported performance (we have four highly credible sources confirming) is between 53-55 peak and between 27-29 LINPACK sustained performance. This is actually better than we were led to believe yesterday when it felt a little wrong to make the "50 petaflop" claim, despite our best sources telling us it was so.

The odd thing is that this is the famed Tianhe-2 system—yes, the one that wasn’t even supposed to be completed until 2015. Further, the system’s grand unveiling was going to unleash 100 petaflops onto the world. While we’re still working on understanding the odd timing on this, the fact remains that there’s nothing on the horizon that is going to be able to touch it unless there are some major surprises, which sources emphatically say there will not be.

Will this be Earth Simulator 2?

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