The 40th edition of the twice-yearly Top500 list of the world’s leading supercomputers has been released, and early indications that Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Cray XK7 system, Titan, would take the top spot proved accurate. Boasting 560,640 processors, including 261,632 Nvidia K20x accelerator cores, Titan achieved 17.59 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark, beating the record of 16.32 petaflops previously set by Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Now the number two system, Sequoia – at 1,572,864 cores – is the first system with one million or more cores.
The third spot on the list has been claimed by Fujitsu’s K computer installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan; the fourth position goes to a BlueGene/Q system named Mira at Argonne National Laboratory; and Juqueen, a BlueGene/Q system, at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany completes the top five.
Following an upgrade, Juqueen is now the most powerful system in Europe. Another new system in the Top 10 is Stampede, a Dell PowerEdge C8220 system installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas in Austin. It uses the new Intel Xeon Phi processors (previously known as MIC) to achieve its 2.6 petaflops.
In total, 23 systems on this latest list have achieved petaflops performance. It should be noted that despite delivering petascale performance on applications, the Cray Blue Waters system at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chose not to submit a Linpack benchmark performance figure.
