The Tianhe-2 supercomputer, developed by the National University of Defense Technology in China, has been recognized as the world’s most powerful in the Top500 ranking updated on June 2013. By the end of the year it’s expected to be installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China. With its 33,862.7 TFlop/s, it nearly doubled the computing power of Titan, the former king of supercomputers. Its computing power peak can in theory reach 54,902.4 TFlop/s.

The construction of the supercomputer Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way 2, was completed two years ahead of the original schedule to give back to China the first place in the Top500 since November 2010, when the place belonged to the Tianhe-1A system.

The new system uses mainly Chinese components though par of the hardware is Intel. The Kylin Linux operating system, although a version of Linux, was developed in China to be used in environments where reliability and security are required. The purpose of this project is in fact not only to have the most powerful supercomputer in the world but also reduce the country’s dependence on foreign manufacturers, at both hardware and software level.

To achieve its extraordinary computing power, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer uses 16,000 nodes, each equipped with two Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 12-core microprocessors based on the Ivy Bridge architecture and three Xeon Phi microprocessors. The total is 32,000 Xeon microprocessors and 48,000 Xeon Phi microprocessors. Overall, it has 3,120,000 cores that work together using a Chinese interconnect called TH Express-2. The RAM is 1,024 TBytes.

This enormous amount of hardware consumes a power of 17,808 kW, more than twice as much as the Titan supercomputer, which from that point of view is really efficient. We’re still talking about a remarkable power consumption.

The Tianhe-2 supercomputer is due to be used for research and educational purposes to meet at least the requirements of southern China. Its remarkable computing power will certainly have many uses and who knows how long it will be before another system manages to take its crown.

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