| Top500©: Top 5 Supercomputers as of November 2011 | http://www.top500.org/ | ||||
| Current (no changes from 6/2011) | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Last January (2011) | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4 |
| Computer | K Computer | Tianhe-1A | Jaguar | Nebulae | Tsubame 2.0 |
| Vendor | Fujitsu | NUDT | Cray | Dawning (Voltaire/IBM) | Hewlett Packard |
| Maximum Speed | 8.16 pf | 2.57 pf | 1.759 pf | 1.271 pf | 1.19 pf |
| Theoretical Speed | 8.77 pf | 4.70 pf | 2.331 pf | 2.984 pf | 2.29 pf |
| Country | Japan | China | USA | China | Japan |
| # of Cores | 548,352 | 186,368 | 224,162 | 120,640 | 73,278 |
| Who runs it | RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) | Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) | Oak Ridge National Laboratory | National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) | Tokyo Institute of Technology |
| Location | Wako, Japan | Changsha, Hunan, China | Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA | Shenzhen, Guangdong, China | Tokyo, Japan |
| Projects | Atmospheric phenomena | Petroleum exploration | Open scientific research in | Computational modeling and | |
| Real-time earthquake & tsunami simulations | Aircraft simulation | nanotechnology, biological | simulations | ||
| Available to international clients | systems, energy, etc. | Open research for all students | |||
| (Mostly earth science, material science | at Tokyo Institute of Technology | ||||
| engineering & physics sciences.) | - even undergraduates | ||||
| Note: Won't enter service until 2012 | |||||
| Website | http://www.aics.riken.jp/index_e.html | http://english.nudt.edu.cn/index.asp | http://www.csm.ornl.gov/ | http://english.siat.cas.cn/ | http://www.gsic.titech.ac.jp/en |
| The next Top500 winner will most likely be Sequoia, expected to run at 20 petaflops. It was originally tracked to win in June, 2011, however has been delayed due to budget woes. It is being built for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories for “weapons’ science calculations necessary to build more accurate physical models. This work is a cornerstone of NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship program to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile today and into the future without underground testing.” To put 20 Petaflops into perspective, “if each of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour. It will have 1.6 petabytes of memory, 96 racks, 98,304 compute nodes, and 1.6 million cores.1 | |||||
| The NNSA: Established by Congress in 2000, NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy responsible for enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science in the nation’s national security enterprise. NNSA maintains and enhances the safety, security, reliability, and performance of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear testing; reduces the global danger from weapons of mass destruction; provides the U.S. Navy with safe and effective nuclear propulsion; and responds to nuclear and radiological emergencies in the U.S. and abroad. See http://nnsa.energy.gov/. |
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| The expectation, based on development of processor technology,
is that the first exascale system may arrive around 2018. An exaflop is a million trillion
calculations per second, or a quintillion, and is a thousand times faster
than a petaflop. The development of an exascale system is estimated to happen
in the 2018-2020 time frame, but it is also contingent on the development of
software systems that can utilize what may be 100 million cores. from ComputerWorld,
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9209918/Obama_sets_126M_for_next_gen_supercomputing |
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| 1 NNSA awards IBM contract to build next generation supercomputer, February 3, 200 | |||||
| https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2009/NR-09-02-01.html | |||||