The Tianhe-2 supercomputer--the world's fastest--currently has the processing power equivalent of over 7,800 Apple Mac Pros. And it's about to receive a 3x speed upgrade.
Perched at the top of the list of the World’s fastest supercomputers is a Chinese system called Tianhe-2. This supercomputer debuted in 2013 and is the creation of China’s NUDT (National University for Defense Technology.)
The Tianhe-2 (which translates to ‘Milky Way’) packs a boggling array of processing hardware, namely 32,000 Intel Xeon E5-2692 v2 processors and 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P co-processors that enable it to currently perform at a hugely capable 54.9 petaFLOPS. Floating point operations per second (FLOPS) is the definitive benchmark of processing prowess. For comparison, a single new Apple Mac Pro offers up to 7 teraFLOPS of performance, which means an army of about 7,843 of these computers would be required to rival this supercomputer. And this supercomputer is still a work in progress.
A year ago, the US State Department--in a bid to slow down the rapid development of this supercomputer--blocked further sales of Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors to Chinese institutions. As a response, China is reported to have invested all the funds intended for purchasing from Intel and other foreign processor vendors in into the creation of locally-developed processors to power this supercomputer. According to a report from technology website VRWorld earlier this year, over $500 million--the budget originally associated with the purchase of the new processors--has been utilized in the homegrown development of Alpha and ARM processors.
With the addition of these new processors, the peak power of this supercomputer is expected to breach the elusive 100 petaFLOPS mark, even touching an impossible 200-300 petaFLOPS, assuming the building it is located within can support the massively increased thermal and power challenges.
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 "Tianhe-2 supercomputer | National University for Defense Technology (NUDT)")
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