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

Milky Way The Milky Way or Milky Way Galaxy is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the #Appearance, galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars in other arms of the galax ...

2') is a 33.86- petaflop

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of 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 instruc ...

located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou,

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. 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 The Sunway TaihuLight ( ''Shénwēi·tàihú zhī guāng'') is a Chinese supercomputer which, , is ranked 11th in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as ''divine power, the light of Taihu Lake ...

. In 2015, plans by Sun Yat-sen University 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 boards. In response to the U.S. sanctions, China introduced the

supercomputer in 2016, which substantially outperforms the Tianhe-2 (and also affected the update of Tianhe-2 to Tianhe-2A, replacing U.S. tech), and in November 2022 ranks eighth in the TOP500 list while using completely domestic technology including the Sunway 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 ) means "wide" or "vast", and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. The name "''Guang''" ultimately came from Guangxin ( zh, labels=no, first=t, t= , s=广信), an outpost established in Han dynasty ...

province, and the government of Guangzhou city. It was built by China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in collaboration with the Chinese IT firm Inspur. Inspur manufactured the

printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB), also called printed wiring board (PWB), is a Lamination, laminated sandwich structure of electrical conduction, conductive and Insulator (electricity), insulating layers, each with a pattern of traces, planes ...

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 Titan most often refers to: * Titan (moon), the largest moon of Saturn * Titans, a race of deities in Greek mythology Titan or Titans may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Fictional entities Fictional locations * Titan in fiction, fictiona ...

by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. Titan, which is housed at the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and energy production, the research and development of nuclear power, the military's nuclear w ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...

, 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's début in November 2010. The

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office ...

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 Nov ...

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

). The top system, IBM Sequoia, tested at 15,363 gigaTEPS. It also holds first place in the

HPCG benchmark The High Performance Conjugate Gradients Benchmark (HPCG benchmark) is a supercomputing benchmark (computing), benchmark test proposed by Michael Heroux from Sandia National Laboratories, and Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek from the University of ...

test proposed by Jack Dongarra, with 0.580 HPCG PFLOPS in June 2014. Tianhe-2 has been housed at National University of Defense Technology.

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 coprocessor 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 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 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 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 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), often described as being equivalent to one event (or Cycle per second, cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose formal expression in ter ...

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 its ...

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

topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

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.

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 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. 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.

History

Specifications

Criticisms

See also

References

Further reading