In this podcast, Shahin Khan from OrionX joins the Radio Free HPC(opens in new tab) team for a look at the new TOP500(opens in new tab) list of the world's fastest supercomputers.
As announced this morning at ISC 2016(opens in new tab), the fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 is new Sunway TaihuLight System in Wuxi, China. Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC), TaihuLight scored a whopping 93 Petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark. To put that in perspective, that is nearly three times faster than the previous #1 system, the Tianhe-2(opens in new tab) supercomputer, which has moved to #2 after ruling the roost for some three years or so TaihuLight is also five times faster than Titan(opens in new tab), the 17 Petaflop machine at ORNL, which is still the fastest machine in the USA.

Here is the rundown:

• Linpack: 93 Petaflops (Rmax)
• Peak performance: 125.4 Petflops (Rpeak)
• Processor: Sunway SW26010 1.4 GHz processor
• Cores per socket: 260
• Instruction Set: RISC instruction set developed by Sunway
• Interconnect: their TOP500 submission says "Sunway design" but Mellanox supplied the Host Channel Adapter (HCA) and switch chips. Sunway may not call it InfiniBand, but that is exactly what it is. China has political reasons for characterizing the overall system domestic technology.
• Cabinets: 40 Water-cooled cabinets, each with 3 Petaflops of peak performance
• Power consumption: 15.27 Megawatts
• Mflops/watt: 6051

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