Tianhe-2
| Sponsors | 863 Program |
|---|---|
| Location | Guangzhou, China |
| Architecture | Intel Xeon, Xeon Phi, Kylin Linux[1] |
| Power | 17.6 MW (24 MW with cooling) |
| Memory | 1,375 TiB (1,000 TiB CPU and 375 TiB Coprocessor)[1] |
| Storage | 12.4 PB |
| Speed | 33.86 PFLOPS |
| Cost | 2.4 billion Yuan (390 million USD)[2] |
| Purpose | Research and education |
Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (Chinese: 天河-2; lit. 'Milky Way-2') is a 33.86 petaflop supercomputer located in China.[3] It is currently the world's fastest supercomputer according to the TOP500 list for June 2013.[4][5]
History
The development of Tianhe-2 was sponsored by the 863 High Technology Program of the Chinese Government, the government of Guangdong province, and the government of Guangzhou city.[1] It was built by China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in cooperation with the technology company Inspur.[1][5] Inspur manufactured the printed circuit boards and helped with the installation and testing of the system software.[1] It was originally expected to be completed in 2015, but was placed into service in 2013 instead.[6] As of June 2013, it is not yet fully operational, but is expected to be so by the end of 2013.[5]
In June 2013, Tianhe-2 topped the TOP500 list of fastest supercomputers in the world. The computer beat out second place finisher Titan by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. Titan, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, achieved 17.59 petaflops, while Tianhe-2 achieved 33.86 petaflops. Tianhe-2's debut at the top of the list returned the title of world's fastest supercomputer to China for first time since Tianhe-1 last held the title in November 2010. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers said Tianhe-2's win "symbolizes China's unflinching commitment to the supercomputing arms race".[5] Overall, China houses 66 of the top 500 supercomputers, second only to the United States' 252 systems.[3]
Also in June 2013, Tianhe-2 placed sixth on the Graph500 list of top supercomputers. In their benchmark, the system tested at 2061 giga-TEPS (traversed edges per second). The top system, IBM Sequoia, tested at 15363 giga-TEPS.[4]
Tianhe-2 will be housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou (NSCC-GZ) after testing is complete.[1]
Applications
According to NUDT, Tianhe-2 will be used for simulation, analysis, and government security applications.[1]
Specifications
Tianhe-2 consists of 16,000 compute nodes, each comprising two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi chips for a total of 3,120,000 cores.[3] This figure represents the world's biggest installation of Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips. Each of the 16,000 nodes has 88 gigabytes of memory for the Ivy Bridge part and 8 gigabytes for the Xeon part. The system total is 1.404 petabytes of memory.[1]
During testing, Tianhe-2 was laid out in a non-optimal confined space. When assembled at its final location, the system will have a theoretical peak performance of 54.9 petaflops. At peak power consumption, it draws 17.6 megawatts for the system itself and 24 megawatts with outside cooling systems. The computer takes up 720 square meters of space.[1]
The front-end system consists of 4096 Galaxy FT-1500 CPUs, a chip designed and built by NUDT. Each FT-1500 has 16 cores and has a 1.8 gigahertz cycle time. The chip has a performance of 144 gigaflops and runs at 65 watts. The interconnect, called the TH Express-2, was designed in house by NUDT. It uses a fat tree topology with 13 switches each of 576 ports.[1]
Tianhe-2 runs on Kylin Linux, a version of the operating system developed by NUDT. Resource management is based on Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM).[1]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Dongarra, Jack (June 3, 2013). "Visit to the National University for Defense Technology Changsha, China" (PDF). Netlib. Retrieved June 17, 2013.
- ^ Chen, Stephen (20 June 2013). "World's fastest supercomputer may get little use".
- ^ a b c "June 2013". TOP500. Retrieved 17 June 2013.
- ^ a b "The Graph 500 List: June 2013". Graph 500. Retrieved June 19, 2013.
- ^ a b c d Davey Alba (June 17, 2013). "China's Tianhe-2 Caps Top 10 Supercomputers". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved June 19, 2013.
- ^ Michael Kan, IDG News Service (2012-10-31). "China is building a 100-petaflop supercomputer". infoworld.com. Retrieved 2012-10-31.