Tianhe-2 supercomputer at 31 petaflops is title contender
(Phys.org) —How is this for bragging rights in the always-on title grab for the world's fastest supercomputer: China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, aka Milkyway-2, recently measured at speeds of 31 petaflops (30.65) out of a theoretical peak of 49.19. The kicker is that it was not even running at full capacity. The fastest result was only using 90 percent of the machine. The stats come from a five-hour Linpack test using 14,336 nodes and 50 GB of memory of each node. (The Linpack benchmark is a measure of a computer's floating-point rate of execution. It is determined by running a computer program that solves a system of linear equations.) The numbers were revealed by University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who introduced the Linpack benchmarks, and who helps compile the biannual Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.