China has the fastest Supercomputer in the world according to latest 41st edition of TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the World. Called Tianhe-2, the fastest supercomputer is developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology with a performance of 33.86 petaflops.
If you do not understand how much a petaflop is – here is a simple definition. One Petaflop is equivalent to 1000 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second).
United States has the second (Titan) and third (Sequoia) fastest supercomputers. In Top 10 ranking, United States has 5, China has 2, Germany has 2 and Japan has 1. The Chinese topper, Tianhe-2 is not only the fastest, but by a very long margin as well. It is nearly twice as powerful as 2nd ranked Titan.
While India has performed much better compared to November 2012 list when India had only 1 Supercomputer ranked at 86th, still at a global level India is far behind as far as super computing goes.
Indian Supercomputers in Top 100 list
|Rank||Site||System||Cores||Rmax (TFlop/s)||Rpeak (TFlop/s)||Power (kW)|
|36||Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology||iDataPlex DX360M4, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Infiniband FDR||38016||719.2||790.7||790|
|69||Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)||PARAM Yuva – II – R2208GZ Cluster, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Infiniband FDR, Intel Xeon Phi 5110P||30600||386.7||529.4|
|89||National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast||iDataPlex DX360M4, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Infiniband FDR||16832||318.4||350.1||350|
|95||CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modeling and Computer Simulation||Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c Gen8, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.60GHz, Infiniband FDR||17344||303.9||360.8||387|
If you rank India’s fastest super computer with Top ranked Tianhe-2, it really shows the how far behind India is in Supercomputing. Tianhe-2 clocks 33862.7 Teraflops power as compared to Indian iDataPlex which is fastest at 719.2 Teraflops.
Here are the number of Supercomputers in Top 100 list categorized by Countries:
In sheer numbers United States is far ahead with nearly half of all the Supercomputers in Top 100 developed in their country. Japan has 10 while UK has 8.
Even though we pride ourselves to be an IT / Software hub, it is really sad to see that India lags so behind in Supercomputing. Infact, over the years other countries have progressively gone ahead of us. Imagine this, in 2007 India had fourth fastest Supercomputer in the world!