On the Top 500 list of world’s fastest supercomputers, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and its Jaguar system kept the No. 1 spot for years, but China’s new Nebulae is closely followed at No. 2.
On June 31, the Top500 list will be published at the 10th ISC Conference held in Hamburg, Germany. The ranking list is compiled by Hans Meuer who comes from the Mannheim University of Germany; also co-complied with Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
As China’s big entry into supercomputing, Nebulae, which turned up at late last year is currently one of the fastest supercomputer all over the world. Its theoretical peak performance is 2.98 petaflops per sec. One PFlop/s equals one quadrillon calculations per sec.
Nebulae, located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China, who runs on a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. Nebulae’s Linpack performance benchmark was 1.271 PFlop/s so it ranked No. 2. Dawning is an Asia-based high performance computing provider. Supercomputing systems with GPU accelerators have a higher theoretical limit.
Jaguar held on to No. 1 with 1.75 PFlop/s. Jaguar’s theoretical peak is 2.3 Pflop/s and nearly a quarter of a million cores.