Watson may have been able to trounce a distich of Jeopardy champs , but it ca n’t hold a candle to the new king of number crunching , the 3.12 million - core Tianhe-2 .
Built by China ’s National University of Defense Technology at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho , the Tianhe-2 supercomputer runs on a proprietary Linux build . The organisation is powered by 32,000 Xeon processors , themselves augment by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerators and a PB of retentiveness to nourish its 33.86 petaflop ( quadrillion numerical calculations per second ) operation .
That ’s double , double , what the last twelvemonth ’s top - place ( by the semi - annualTop 500 ) supercomputer , the 17.59 petaflop Titan at Oak Ridge National Labs can do . But the race to bump off a Quintrillion computation a second , an exoflop , is just heating up . Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ’s deputy director , Horst Simon , believe that the exaflop roadblock could be broken by the remainder of the decade , assuming researchers can figure out how to power the appendage . The Tianhe-2 consumes 17.8 megawatts currently and as Horst explains :
The increasing drift in power efficiency , though it might await like a gradual slope over sentence , is really a one - time addition that came from change to accelerator / manycore [ architectures ] in 2010 . This is not a sustainable trend in the absence seizure of other raw technology . There is no more magic — we ’re maxed out . mightily now , the most efficient system needs 1 to 2 megawatt per petaflops . Multiply that by 1,000 to get to exascale and the tycoon is simply unaffordable .
Perhaps most impressive is the amount of indigenous hardware employed in the auto . Outside of the Intel processors , “ The interconnect , operating system , front - end processors , and software package are mainly Chinese , ” said Top500 editor Jack Dongarra . We ’ll have to wait until December , however , to see if the Tianhe-2 can accommodate onto its crown in an increasingly crowded orbit . [ Top 500 – CNet – paradigm : Top 500 ]
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