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Tianhe-2
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<h2 id="history">History</h2> <p>The development of Tianhe-2 was sponsored by the <a href="/facts/863_Program/yoxs62qw">863 High Technology Program</a>, initiated by the Chinese government, the government of <a href="/facts/Guangdong/wvjsjdb1">Guangdong</a> province, and the government of <a href="/facts/Guangzhou/9hxfmEjq">Guangzhou city</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:8" href="#fn:8"><sup>8</sup></a> It was built by China's <a href="/facts/National_University_of_Defense_Technology/zKVDyrYQ">National University of Defense Technology</a> (NUDT) in collaboration with the Chinese IT firm <a href="/facts/Inspur/FKT3kYvc">Inspur</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:9" href="#fn:9"><sup>9</sup></a><a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:10" href="#fn:10"><sup>10</sup></a> Inspur manufactured the <a href="/facts/Printed_circuit_board/muSR2p43">printed circuit boards</a> and helped with the installation and testing of the system software.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:11" href="#fn:11"><sup>11</sup></a> The project was originally scheduled for completion in 2015, but was instead declared operational in June 2013.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:12" href="#fn:12"><sup>12</sup></a> 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.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:13" href="#fn:13"><sup>13</sup></a> </p><p>In June 2013, Tianhe-2 topped the <a href="/facts/TOP500/rz8zbyss">TOP500</a> list of fastest supercomputers in the world and was still listed as the fastest machine in the November 2015 list.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:14" href="#fn:14"><sup>14</sup></a> The computer beat out second-place finisher <a href="/facts/Titan_(supercomputer)/vUYqR0yv">Titan</a> by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. Titan, which is housed at the <a href="/facts/United_States_Department_of_Energy/PRp6Cz8g">United States Department of Energy</a>'s <a href="/facts/Oak_Ridge_National_Laboratory/Elq84HKF">Oak Ridge National Laboratory</a>, 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 <a href="/facts/Tianhe-I/ut9prMJt">Tianhe-I</a>'s début in November 2010. The <a href="/facts/Institute_of_Electrical_and_Electronics_Engineers/UddC4pUW">Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers</a> said Tianhe-2's win "symbolizes China's unflinching commitment to the supercomputing arms race".<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:15" href="#fn:15"><sup>15</sup></a> In June 2013, China housed 66 of the top 500 supercomputers, second only to the United States' 252 systems.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:16" href="#fn:16"><sup>16</sup></a> 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.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:17" href="#fn:17"><sup>17</sup></a> </p><p><a href="/facts/Graph500/33k7fPMQ">Graph500</a> is an alternate list of top supercomputers based on a benchmark testing analysis of <a href="/facts/Graph_(abstract_data_type)/b8qcddXa">graphs</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:18" href="#fn:18"><sup>18</sup></a> In their benchmark, the system tested at 2,061 gigaTEPS (<a href="/facts/Traversed_edges_per_second/TfLUj5eu">traversed edges per second</a>). The top system, <a href="/facts/IBM_Sequoia/ToKXt78K">IBM Sequoia</a>, tested at 15,363 gigaTEPS.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:19" href="#fn:19"><sup>19</sup></a> It also holds first place in the <a href="/facts/HPCG_benchmark/JcuYKs14">HPCG benchmark</a> test proposed by <a href="/facts/Jack_Dongarra/xBWGdDT9">Jack Dongarra</a>, with 0.580 HPCG PFLOPS in June 2014.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:20" href="#fn:20"><sup>20</sup></a> </p><p>Tianhe-2 has been housed at <a href="/facts/National_University_of_Defense_Technology/zKVDyrYQ">National University of Defense Technology</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:21" href="#fn:21"><sup>21</sup></a> </p> <h2 id="specifications">Specifications</h2> <p>According to NUDT, Tianhe-2 would have been used for simulation, analysis, and government security applications.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:22" href="#fn:22"><sup>22</sup></a> </p><p>With 16,000 computer nodes, each comprising two Intel <a href="/facts/Ivy_Bridge_(microarchitecture)/VklHpEK1">Ivy Bridge</a> Xeon processors and three <a href="/facts/Xeon_Phi/Fv5dhyKc">Xeon Phi</a> <a href="/facts/Coprocessor/WsVXzAGo">coprocessor</a> chips, it represented the world's largest installation of Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips, counting a total of 3,120,000 cores<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:23" href="#fn:23"><sup>23</sup></a> (because of US <a href="/facts/Economic_sanctions/fKzSIKvR">sanctions</a>, the upgrades Tianhe-2A switched out the Xeon Phi accelerators for Matrix-2000,<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:24" href="#fn:24"><sup>24</sup></a> and the upgraded faster system has 4,981,760 cores in total, but it still dropped from 2nd to 4th place because of newer, 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 <a href="/facts/TiB/BNHUp9Qq">TiB</a> (approximately 1.34 <a href="/facts/Pebibyte/BNHUp9Qq">PiB</a>).<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:25" href="#fn:25"><sup>25</sup></a> 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 <a href="/facts/Lustre_(file_system)/byz4hsWW">Lustre</a> file system with 100 GiB/s sustained throughput.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:26" href="#fn:26"><sup>26</sup></a> <a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:27" href="#fn:27"><sup>27</sup></a> </p><p>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.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:28" href="#fn:28"><sup>28</sup></a> </p><p>The front-end system consisted of 4096 Galaxy <a href="/facts/FeiTeng/LyEAPxuU">FT-1500</a> CPUs, a <a href="/facts/SPARC/m7KhEtET">SPARC</a> derivative designed and built by NUDT. Each FT-1500 has 16 cores and a 1.8 <a href="/facts/Hertz/6Wshj5qm">GHz</a> clock frequency. The chip has a performance of 144 gigaflops and runs on 65 watts. The <a href="/facts/Interconnect/3BMeTFXp">interconnect</a>, called the TH Express-2, designed by NUDT, utilized a <a href="/facts/Fat_tree/AyFyz89J">fat tree</a> <a href="/facts/Network_topology/rBYE0kke">topology</a> with 13 switches each of 576 ports.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:29" href="#fn:29"><sup>29</sup></a> </p><p>Tianhe-2 ran on <a href="/facts/Kylin_(operating_system)/to4fgcGk">Kylin Linux</a>, a version of the operating system developed by NUDT. Resource management is based on <a href="/facts/Slurm_Workload_Manager/yjLgKIVK">Slurm Workload Manager</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:30" href="#fn:30"><sup>30</sup></a> </p> <h2 id="criticisms">Criticisms</h2> <p>Researchers have criticized Tianhe-2 for being difficult to use. "It is at the world's frontier in terms of calculation capacity, but the functionality 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.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:31" href="#fn:31"><sup>31</sup></a> </p><p>The location of Tianhe-2 is in Southern China, where the warmer weather and thus higher average temperatures could increase electricity consumption by about 10% compared with a location in Northern China. </p> <h2 id="see-also">See also</h2> <ul><li><a href="/facts/Tianhe-1/ut9prMJt">Tianhe-1</a></li> <li><a href="/facts/Supercomputing_in_China/0aoxX8F7">Supercomputing in China</a></li></ul> <h2 id="further-reading">Further reading</h2> <ul><li>MilkyWay-2 supercomputer: system and application. Xiangke LIAO, Liquan XIAO, Canqun YANG, Yutong LU. Front. Comput. Sci., 2014, 8(3): 345–356 DOI:10.1007/s11704-014-3501-3 (6 September 2013)</li> <li>High performance interconnect network for Tianhe system. Xiang-Ke Liao, Zheng-Bin Pang, Ke-Fei Wang, Yu-Tong Lu, Min Xie, Jun Xia, De-Zun Dong, Guang Suo. JOURNAL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 30(2): 259–272 Mar. 2015. DOI:10.1007/s11390-015-1520-7 (30 November 2014)</li></ul> <h2 id="references">References</h2> <ol> <li id="fn:1"><p>"June 2013". TOP500. Retrieved 17 June 2013. <a href="http://www.top500.org/lists/2013/06/" target="_blank">http://www.top500.org/lists/2013/06/</a> <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:2"><p>"The Top 500 List: June 2013". Retrieved 10 July 2014. <a href="http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/06/" target="_blank">http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/06/</a> <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:3"><p>Davey Alba (17 June 2013). "China's Tianhe-2 Caps Top 10 Supercomputers". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved 19 June 2013. <a href="/wiki/Davey_Alba" target="_blank">/wiki/Davey_Alba</a> <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:4"><p>"US blocks Intel from selling Xeon chips to Chinese supercomputer projects". PCWorld. 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