A Chinese supercomputer has again topped the list of world’s fastest supercomputer, according to The Top 500 list of the globe’s fastest and most powerful supercomputers.
The Tianhe-2, built by China’s National University of Defence Technology (NUDT), is capable of operating at 33.86petaflop/s.
Alessandro Curioni, head of the computational sciences department at IBM’s Zurich lab, told the BBC:"We need a more practical measurement that reflects the real use of these supercomputers based on their most important applications
"We use supercomputers to solve real problems – to push science forward, to help innovation, and ultimately to make our lives better.
"So, one thing that myself and some of my colleagues will do is discuss with the Top500 organisers adding in new measurements."
Tianhe-2, which runs on the Kylin Linux operating system, features 3,120,000 cores, an Intel MKL-11.0.0 Math Library, MPICH2 with a customised GLEX channel and memory storage of 1,024,000GB.
Tianhe-2, which claims to have double the processing power of Titan, also attained the top position in June 2013, beating the US Department of Energy’s Titan into second place.
TOP500 list co-creator Erich Strohmaier said: "More representative benchmarks have to be much more complex in their coding, their execution and how many aspects of their performance need to be recorded and published. This makes understanding their behaviour more difficult.
"Finding a good middle-ground between these extremes has proven to be very difficult, as unfortunately all previous attempts found critics from both camps and were not widely adopted."
