A Cray supercomputer at the US government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory was named Monday the world’s fastest, overtaking an IBM supercomputer at another American research center.<\/p>\n
The ranking released by researchers from the United States and Germany found that Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, achieved 17.59 petaflops, or quadrillions of calculations per second.<\/p>\n
Titan, which gets funding from the US Department of Energy, is used for research in energy, climate change, efficient engines, materials and other scientific research.<\/p>\n
Titan knocked the IBM Sequoia at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California into second place. It could only manage 16.32 petaflops.<\/p>\n
Rounding out the top five were Fujitsu’s K computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan; an IBM BlueGene\/Q system named Mira at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, and another IBM BlueGene\/Q system named Juqueen at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany.<\/p>\n
Researchers said 251 of the 500 systems were in the United States, with 105 in Europe and 123 in Asia, including 72 in China.<\/p>\n
Intel provided the processors for 76 percent of the systems while AMD was used in 12 percent and IBM in 10.6 percent.<\/p>\n
The announcement came from the TOP500 list compiled by the University of Mannheim, Germany; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee.<\/p>\n
Quantum computing \u2013 a step closer<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n