What's truly astonishing is that:a) Wired does not mention the graphics processing units are from NVIDIAb) the Chinese may have taken an insurmountable lead in the need-for-speed derby and the ORNL computer, designed to be the world's fastest may not make it.The folks at Wired are smart and have been on the tech beat for a long time, they should know better than to do puff pieces.If interested in this stuff, whether for modeling complex-chaotic systems such as markets or weather or for national security applications or just because supercomputers are amazing in their own right see also:...
I apparently was crabby that day.
I'll repost the ten fastest 'puters from the Top500 list after the jump so you can see what a lead China is building at the pinnacle of the computer-makers art.
From Inside HPC [high performance computing]:
We have some breaking news from the IHPC Forum in Guangzhou today. Researchers in China are busy upgrading the MilkyWay 2 (Tianhe-2) system to nearly 95 Petaflops (peak). This should nearly double the performance of the system, which is currently ranked at #2 on TOP500 with 33.86 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark. The upgraded system, dubbed Tianhe -2A, should be completed in the coming months.Details about the system upgrade were presented at the conference opening session. While the current system derives much of its performance from Intel Knights Corner co-processors, the new system swaps these PCI devices out for custom-made 4-way MATRIX-200o boards, with each chip providing 2.46 Teraflops of peak performance.According to tweets posted by Satoshi Matsuoka, the upgraded system is impressive in that it is only 2+years in making design-to-board, wit/80,000 chips for the upgrade....MORE
A bit over a year ago we were impressed that China had built the world's fastest machine, still ranked #1, with all-Chinese tech:
June 2016
China has had the world's fastest computer for the last three years or so, the Tianhe-2, which used Intel microprocessors so this latest computer is a remarkable achievement. The U.S. plans to recapture the top spot for the first time in five years years when Oak Ridge builds their latest machine using IBM CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA's NV Link tying it all together. The ORNL 'puter should hit either the Nov. 2017 or June 2018 Top 500 lists....
(Milky Way 2 uses Intel) but now #2 is about to become #1 and I am out of superlatives.
And from "Supercomputers 'The 49th TOP500 List was published June 20, 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany.'":
