Tianhe-2 (Milkyway 2) has retained the top spot as the world’s fastest supercomputer, and is capable of operating at 33.862 petaflop/s. The American Titan supercomputer, which came in second place, performs at 17.590 petaflop/s.
The ‘TOP500′ list of the world’s fastest supercomputers is compiled twice a year by the University of Mannheim. Performance is measured using the LINPACK benchmark, a measure of a computer’s floating-point rate of execution. According to the project, “LINPACK was chosen because it is widely used and performance numbers are available for almost all relevant systems”. The performance measured using this benchmark does not reflect the overall performance of any given system. It only reflects the performance of a dedicated system for solving a dense system of linear equations.
However, it is understood that IBM will press for a change in the way the list is calculated. “Today we need a more practical measurement that reflects the real use of these supercomputers based on their most important applications”, according to Dr Alessandro Curioni, head of IBM’s computational sciences department, Zurich.
The LINPACK Benchmark was introduced by Jack Dongarra, and was first published as an appendix to the Linpack Users’ Guide first published in 1979.
