SPEED OF COMPUTING: TOP 10 FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTERS IN THE WORLD.

The performance or processing speed of supercomputer is measured in petaflop that is equal to a million billion or a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. These massive machines are not made for fun but rather help scientists, meteorologists to do research or forecast global climate and whether, while some are used being to simulate brain activity or effects of storm or wind on a plane.

Take a look at world top 10 supercomputers as announced in November 2013 by Top500.org, the organization updating the list half-yearly.

1. Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2)

In the war of supercomputer manufacturing, Chinese Tianhe-2 (TH-2 or Milky way2) dominated and has on top of the list since June 2013, remain undefeated till to date. Tianhe-2 is a 33.86 petaflops supercomputer developed by a team of 1300 scientists and engineers located in University of Sun-Yat-sen, Guangzhou, China. This supercomputer has 3,120,000 core processors.

Country: China
Site: National University of Defense Technology (NUDT)
Manufacturer: National University of Defense Technology (NUDT)
Cores: 3,120,000
Linpack Performance (Rmax): 33,862.7 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 54,902.4 TFlop/s
Power: 17,808.00 kW
Memory: 1,024,000 GB
Operating System: Kylin Linux
Purpose/Usage: For local weather service and the National Offshore Oil Corporation
Cost: 2.4 billion Yuan or 3 billion Hong Kong dollars (390 million US Dollars)

 2. Titan

Titan supercomputer is 560,640-core computer which is actually an upgraded version of Jaguar supercomputer developed by an American Supercomputer manufacturer Cray Research Inc. (CRI) located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The initial cost of the unit were approximately $60 million, funded by U.S Department of Energy (DoE) which is raised to $97millions due to addition of Storage system.

Country: U.S.
Site: DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Manufacturer: Cray Inc.
Cores: 560,640
Linpack Performance (Rmax): 17,590.0 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 27,112.5 TFlop/s
Power: 8,209.00 kW
Memory: 710,144 GB
Operating System: Cray Linux Environment
Purpose/Usage: Use to simulate Molecular physics, energy, activity and interaction between electron and atom, global atmosphere modeling.
Cost: $100 million

3. Sequoia

Sequoia – Blue Gene/Q supercomputer manufactured by IBM for National Nuclear Security Administration (NSSA) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is deployed over the site in June 2012 and gain the world #1supercomputer award.

Country: U.S.
Site: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Manufacturer: IBM
Cores: 1,572,864
Linpack Performance (Rmax): 17,173.2 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 20,132.7 TFlop/s
Power: 7,890.00 kW
Memory: 1,572,864 GB
Operating System: Linux
Purpose/Usage: Nuclear weapons simulation, energy, astronomy, study of the human genome, and climate change.
Cost: $250 million dollar

4. K computer

Country: Japan
Site: RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS)
Manufacturer: Fujitsu
Cores: 705,024
Linpack Performance (Rmax): 10,510.0 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 11,280.4 TFlop/s
Power: 12,659.89 kW
Memory: 1,410,048 GB
Operating System: Linux
Purpose/Usage: Climate research, Medical researches and Disaster prevention
Cost: $1.2 billion US dollar

5. Mira

Country: U.S.
Site: DOE/SC/Argonne National Laboratory
Manufacturer: IBM
Cores: 786,432
Linpack Performance (Rmax): 8,586.6 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 10,066.3 TFlop/s
Power: 3,945.00 kW
Operating System: Linux
Purpose/Usage: Used for scientific research in the fields of material science, climatology and computational chemistry.
Cost: $50 million dollar

6. Piz Daint

Country: Switzerland
Site: Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)
Manufacturer: Cray Inc.
Cores: 115,984
Linpack Performance (Rmax): 6,271.0 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 7,788.9 TFlop/s
Power: 2,325.00 kW
Operating System: Cray Linux Environment
Purpose/Usage: Weather forecast, climatology and scientific researches
Cost: ??? dollars

7. Stampede

Country: U.S.
Site: Texas Advanced Computing Center/Univ. of Texas, Austin
Manufacturer: Dell
Cores: 462,462
Linpack Performance (Rmax): 5,168.1 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 8,520.1 TFlop/s
Power: 4,510.00 kW
Memory: 192,192 GB
Operating System: Linux
Purpose/Usage: In the field of medicine to detect brain tumors, biology (especially microbiology) human genetics, geophysics and earth sciences for earthquake forecast.
Cost: More than $56 million dollar

8.  JUQUEEN

Country: Germany
Site: Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ)
Manufacturer: IBM
Cores: 458,752
Linpack Performance (Rmax): 5,008.9 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 5,872.0 TFlop/s
Power: 2,301.00 kW
Memory: 458,752 GB
Operating System: Linux
Purpose/Usage: For researches in different fields of science
Cost: ??? dollars

9. Vulcan – Blue Gene

Country: U.S.
Site: DOE/NNSA/ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Manufacturer: IBM
Cores: 393,216
Linpack Performance (Rmax): 4,293.3 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 5,033.2 TFlop/s
Power: 1,972.00 kW
Memory: 393,216 GB
Operating System: Linux
Purpose/Usage: Used for researches in Biology, Plasma Physics, Climate Science, Molecular Systems and Solid & Fluid Engineering
Cost: $100 million

10. Super MUC

Country: Germany
Site: Leibniz Rechenzentrum
Manufacturer: IBM
Cores: 147,456
Lin pack Performance (Rmax): 2,897.0 TFlop/s
Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 3,185.1 TFlop/s
Power: 3,422.67 kW
Operating System: Linux
Purpose/Usage: Researchers in Medicine, Astrophysics, Earth quake simulation, computational chemistry,  fluid dynamics and genome analysis
Cost: $111million dollar.

Sources

1. www.top500.org
2. http://www.crizmo.com/worlds-top-10-supercomputers-with-their-cost-speed-and-usage.html