Supercomputer Tianhe -2

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer, shocks the world by arriving two years early

Supercomputer Tianhe -2 

China has built Tianhe-2, a supercomputer capable of 33.86 petaflops, after Titan capable of 17.59 petaflops, almost double. The computer has 32,000 Ivy Bridge Xeon CPUs and 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator boards for a total of 3,120,000 compute cores, which are decked out with 1.4 petabytes of RAM and running on Linux.

The construction of Tianhe-2 (literally Milky Way-2) comes as a huge surprise, as it was originally scheduled for deployment in 2015. Tianhe-2, which is currently being tested in a non-optimal space, is capable of 33.86 petaflops — when it’s deployed in its final location, however, and when any bugs have been ironed out, the theoretical peak performance will be 54.9 petaflops. To achieve a theoretical peak of 54.9 petaflops, Tianhe-2 has a mind-bogglingly insane hardware spec. There are a total of 125 cabinets housing 16,000 compute nodes, each of which contains two Intel Xeon (Ivy Bridge) CPUs and three 57-core Intel Xeon Phiaccelerator cards. Each compute node has a total of 88GB of RAM( according to a report [PDF] by Jack Dongarra).

The peak power consumption for the processors, memory, and interconnect is 17.6 megawatts, with the water cooling system bringing that up to 24MW.