Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (, i.e. '

Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye ...

2') is a 33.86-

petaflops In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

located in the

National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou The National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou houses Tianhe-2, which is currently the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world, with a measured 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). Tianhe-2 is operated by the National ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers. It was the world's fastest supercomputer according to the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

lists for June 2013, November 2013, June 2014, November 2014, June 2015, and November 2015. The record was surpassed in June 2016 by the Sunway TaihuLight. In 2015, plans of the

Sun Yat-sen University Sun Yat-sen University (, abbreviated SYSU and colloquially known in Chinese as Zhongda), also known as Zhongshan University, is a national key public research university located in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. It was founded in 1924 by and nam ...

in collaboration with Guangzhou district and city administration to double its computing capacities were stopped by a U.S. government rejection of Intel's application for an export license for the CPUs and

coprocessor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography o ...

boards. In response to the U.S.

sanction A sanction may be either a permission or a restriction, depending upon context, as the word is an auto-antonym. Examples of sanctions include: Government and law * Sanctions (law), penalties imposed by courts * Economic sanctions, typically a ba ...

, China introduced the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in 2016, which substantially outperforms the Tianhe-2 (and also affected the update of Tianhe-2 to Tianhe-2A replacing US tech), and now ranks fourth in the TOP500 list while using completely domestic technology including the

Sunway Sunway may refer to: Places * Bandar Sunway, also called Sunway or Sunway City, a township in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia Brands and enterprises * Sunway (processor), a series of Chinese computer microprocessors * Sunway Group, a Malaysian co ...

manycore microprocessor.

History

The development of Tianhe-2 was sponsored by the 863 High Technology Program, initiated by the Chinese government, the government of

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

province, and the government of

Guangzhou city Guangzhou (, ; ; or ; ), also known as Canton () and alternatively romanized as Kwongchow or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of Guangdong province in southern China. Located on the Pearl River about north-northwest of Hong Kon ...

. It was built by China's

National University of Defense Technology The National University of Defense Technology (NUDT; ) is a National university, national Public university, public research university in Changsha, Hunan, China. Founded in 1953 as the People's Liberation Army Military Academy of Engineering, ...

(NUDT) in collaboration with the Chinese IT firm

Inspur Inspur, whose full name is Inspur Group (Chinese: 浪潮集团; pinyin: Làngcháo Jítuán), is an information technology conglomerate in mainland China focusing on cloud computing, big data, key application hosts, servers, storage, artificia ...

. Inspur manufactured the

printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in Electrical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a L ...

s and helped with the installation and testing of the system software. The project was originally scheduled for completion in 2015, but was instead declared operational in June 2013. As of June 2013, the supercomputer had yet to become fully operational. It was expected to reach its full computing capabilities by the end of 2013. In June 2013, Tianhe-2 topped the

list of fastest supercomputers in the world and was still listed as the fastest machine in the November 2015 list. The computer beat out second-place finisher Titan by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. Titan, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research and ...

, achieved 17.59 petaflops, while Tianhe-2 achieved 33.86 petaflops. Tianhe-2's performance returned the title of the world's fastest supercomputer to China after

Tianhe-I Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 (, ; '' Sky River Number One'') is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world fro ...

's début in November 2010. The

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

said Tianhe-2's win "symbolizes China's unflinching commitment to the supercomputing arms race". In June 2013, China housed 66 of the top 500 supercomputers, second only to the United States' 252 systems. The Chinese total increased to 168 of the top 500 systems by June 2016, overtaking the United States which fell to 165 of the top 500 supercomputers.

Graph500 The Graph500 is a rating of supercomputer systems, focused on data-intensive loads. The project was announced on International Supercomputing Conference in June 2010. The first list was published at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Novem ...

is an alternate list of top supercomputers based on a benchmark testing analysis of

graphs Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

. In their benchmark, the system tested at 2,061 gigaTEPS (

traversed edges per second The number of traversed edges per second (TEPS) that can be performed by a supercomputer cluster is a measure of both the communications capabilities and computational power of the machine. This is in contrast to the more standard metric of floating ...

). The top system,

IBM Sequoia IBM Sequoia was a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). It was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Labora ...

, tested at 15,363 gigaTEPS. It also has first place in the

HPCG benchmark The HPCG (high performance conjugate gradient) benchmark is a supercomputing benchmark test proposed by Michael Heroux from Sandia National Laboratories, and Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek from the University of Tennessee. It is intended to model ...

test proposed by

Jack Dongarra Jack Joseph Dongarra (born July 18, 1950) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Unive ...

, with 0.580 HPCG PFLOPS in June 2014. Tianhe-2 has been housed at

Specifications

According to NUDT, Tianhe-2 would have been used for simulation, analysis, and government security applications. With 16,000 computer nodes, each comprising two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three

Xeon Phi Xeon Phi was a series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application program ...

chips, it represented the world's largest installation of Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips, counting a total of 3,120,000 cores (because of US sanctions, the upgrades Tianhe-2A switched out the Xeon Phi accelerators for Matrix-2000, and the upgraded faster system has 4,981,760 cores in total, but still dropped from 2nd to 4th place because of new faster systems added to the list). Each of the 16,000 nodes possessed 88 gigabytes of memory (64 used by the Ivy Bridge processors, and 8 gigabytes for each of the Xeon Phi processors). The total CPU plus coprocessor memory was 1,375 TiB (approximately 1.34 PiB). The system has a 12.4 PiB H²FS file system consisting of IO forwarding nodes providing a 1 TiB/s burst rate backed by a

Lustre Lustre or Luster may refer to: Places * Luster, Norway, a municipality in Vestlandet, Norway ** Luster (village), a village in the municipality of Luster * Lustre, Montana, an unincorporated community in the United States Entertainment * '' ...

file system with 100 GiB/s sustained throughput. During the testing phase, Tianhe-2 was laid out in a non-optimal confined space. When assembled at its final location, the system will have had a theoretical peak performance of 54.9 petaflops. At peak power consumption, the system itself would have drawn 17.6 megawatts of power. Including external cooling, the system drew an aggregate of 24 megawatts. The completed computer complex would have occupied 720 square meters of space. The front-end system consisted of 4096 Galaxy FT-1500 CPUs, a

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...

derivative designed and built by NUDT. Each FT-1500 has 16 cores and a 1.8

GHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one he ...

clock frequency. The chip has a performance of 144 gigaflops and runs on 65 watts. The

interconnect In telecommunications, interconnection is the physical linking of a carrier's network with equipment or facilities not belonging to that network. The term may refer to a connection between a carrier's facilities and the equipment belonging to ...

, called the TH Express-2, designed by NUDT, utilized a

fat tree The fat tree network is a universal network for provably efficient communication. It was invented by Charles E. Leiserson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. k-ary n-trees, the type of fat-trees commonly used in most high-perf ...

topology In mathematics, topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformations, such ...

with 13 switches each of 576 ports. Tianhe-2 ran on Kylin Linux, a version of the operating system developed by NUDT. Resource management is based on

Slurm Workload Manager The Slurm Workload Manager, formerly known as Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM), or simply Slurm, is a free and open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels, used by many of the world's supercomputers and compu ...

Criticisms

Researchers have criticized Tianhe-2 for being difficult to use. "It is at the world's frontier in terms of calculation capacity, but the function of the supercomputer is still way behind the ones in the US and Japan", says Chi Xuebin, deputy director of the Computer Network and Information Centre. "Some users would need years or even a decade to write the necessary code", he added. The location of Tianhe-2 is in Southern China, where the warmer weather with higher temperature could increase the electricity consumption by about 10% compared with a location in Northern China.

History

Specifications

Criticisms

See also

References

Further reading