The Top 5 Supercomputers on Planet Earth

In today’s world, supercomputers are retrogressive images from those in the mid to late 1960’s. Typically speaking, supercomputers appear to be one (or several connected) large metal containers. Inside the containers, you will find several other “micro-computers” that connect together by a series of wires, ultimately leading to a giant monitor for the system administrator(s).  Over all, the amount of processing power that these expensive machines possess is crazy-stupid. Just imagine playing Call of Duty or Halo on a supercomputer with 1TB internet connections. You’re sure to be the host of any match you participate in!

Starting off our “Top 5” list is a supercomputer located in the United States of America.

Mira is utilized by IBM’s self-fabricated supercomputer, in which peaks out at 8.6 Petaflops (Pflop/s). This supercomputer has found itself a home at the Argonne National Laboratory, and is making great use of the IBM’s BlueGene/Q stage that contains 786,000 center processors. This supercomputer is capable of handling an outstanding 10 quadrillion computations every second. This new line of supercomputers will soon perform, in a single day, what most modern computers can do in 20 years.

This machine is also open for those in science who desire a substantial scale of computing power.

Coming in at number 4, our next supercomputer is hosted in Japan.

K Computer, also known as ‘K PC,’ is an interesting place. This location provides us with the most elevated gauge on these massive supercomputers. The sole development of this massive computer was to provide the highest possible status for speed performances. With an enormous hard drive bay coming in at a total of 10.5 Pflop/s, Fujitsu has designed an impressive supercomputer, now situated in RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan. Hosting 705,000 SPARC64 Octa center processors, this massive computer has full capabilities for performing logical operations. Such operations include worldwide catastrophe counteractive actions; those in the field of meteorology; and even therapeutic examination.

Holding down the list at number 3, we have another supercomputer hosted within the United States.

With Sequoia we have yet another IBM-based supercomputer. Sequoia, much like its predecessor Mira, is running off the BlueGene/Q and holds a vast 1.6 million 16 center processors. This massive supercomputer has been performing at a peak rate of 17.2 Pflop/s!

This supercomputer has found itself a home nesting inside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, it has finally finished the never-ending move to characterize the registering of backing up data on the Stockpile Stewardship Program. This program is intended to aid the United States with the wellbeing, security, and even the viability of the maturing atomic weapons stockpile.

Dropping into second spot is the United States, again.

Titan is indeed one of the most promising moves forward. This massive supercomputer, dubbed Jaguar, is capable of performing the extreme speeds of 17.6 Pflop/s. This supercomputer can utilize an aggregate of 561,000 Opteron 6274, 16 center processors, running at 2.2GHz. To make matters even more outstanding, this mega supercomputer is also running alongside several NVIDIA GPUs. Here, my friends, is your gaming supercomputer.

This supercomputer, is in fact, the most recent supercomputer sent to Oak Ridge. The company had, just last week, taken the ribbon off their new establishment.

Panther, their old supercomputer, is currently being overhauled. Panther highlights 18,699 figure hubs; each of these hubs will host a 12 center AMD Opteron CPU. The Titan – the updated version of Panther – has the same base concept, however, the Panther, has been updated from the 12 center to the 16 center. These CPU’s are also matched with the power of NVIDIA Kepler K20x GPU nested into each hub. Altogether, this supercomputer hosts 18,688 CPUs and another 18,688 GPUs.

And finally, at number 1 on the list, a supercomputer hosted in China.

The Tianhe-2 supercomputer is by far, the most significant of the “Milkyway-2.” Dubbed as the lord of all supercomputers, it produces bolting fast speeds, reaching 33.9 Pflop/s. This supercomputer has been manufactured by China’s National University of Defense Technology.

But what makes this supercomputer so unique is that this beast-of-a-machine is running on an unheard 3,120,000 cores. Thus, involving a series of blended technological services using the Intel Xeon E5 Processors, custom built processors, and even the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor.

With a variety of supercomputers, researchers have found a new way to extend their capabilities from what was once their limitation of working with ultra-complex quantum mechanical counts. These types of supercomputers are often used for atmospheric research, as well as reproducing snippets within the universe. We can also see various groups and military organizations using them for nuclear research, as well as crypt-analysis.

Bringing a future to the forefront of digital/cyber threats and attacks, one day supercomputers will lead the world in war, and in defense of cyber terrorists.

Sources: ALCF (Mira/Cetus/Vesta), AICS (K-Computer), ASC (Sequoia), OLCF (Titan), NetLib (Tianhe-2).

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