World,s PowerFul Computer

Tianhe-2 Supercomputer

The Tianhe-2 supercomputer, installed at China’s National University of Defense Technology, remained in the number one spot on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, released this morning. Today marked the third consecutive six-month period that the machine has topped the list, and the fourth time overall since 2010 that a Chinese machine has dominated.

The list is updated twice a year by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and Prometeus, a German company. This 21-year-old list has, in its history, charted the very leading edge of computing power. Supercomputers have been used over the years in nuclear weapons research, but more recently they have expanded into advanced research into drugs and understanding the nature of disease as well as helping to scour the Earth for new sources of energy. The list has also been the source of occasional political kvetching when the U.S. doesn’t take the top spot, as it hasn’t for the last 18 months or so.

The machine — its name means “Milky Way” — is capable of performing 33.86 quadrillion floating point operations — or FLOPS — in a single second. A floating point operation is a math problem that involves fractional numbers, and when measured in quadrillions is usually referred to as a petaflop. By comparison, the most powerful Mac you can buy from Apple, the Mac Pro, can be configured to top out at about seven teraflops, or seven trillion FLOPS, making the Chinese supercomputer about 4,837 times more powerful by my math.

The U.S. upped the ante in the ongoing rivalry with China last week when the Department of Energy said it would spend $325 million to build a new pair of machines, at least one of which stands a chance at retaking the world-computing crown. It tapped IBM and the chipmaker Nvidia to help build them, and said they should be up and running by 2017.

One of them, dubbed Summit, is being designed for nearly nine times the performance of the Tianhe-2, or about 300 petaflops, which is pretty close to the combined performance — 309 petaflops — of all 500 supercomputers on today’s list.