In 2013, Chinese scientists managed to create a computer capable of performing at least 30 petaflops. Since then, the first line of the international rating Top-500 has been repeatedly given to "Tianhe-2".

The Top 500 rating lists are updated twice a year - in the first summer month and in the last autumn month. In the second place of the list, which includes the most powerful supercomputers in the world with a result of 17.59 petaflops, is the American Titan, in third place, with a minimum margin of 0.42 petaflops, is also the representative of the US Department of Energy - the supercomputer Sequoia.

Sequoia

This one of the most powerful computers in the world is used to simulate nuclear explosions, to cope with the tasks of astronomy and energy. He is able to recognize the secrets of the human genome and calculate the consequences of climate change.

For all those operations that Sequoia conducts in one second, it is necessary to take seven billion people, give everyone a calculator and force them to do mathematical calculations without interruptions for lunch and sleep. If you work all 365 days a year, day and night, then the calculations would take 320 years. Fortunately, the Sequoia was nevertheless built, and now there is no need to manually carry out complex calculations.

Titan

Before the advent of a Chinese competitor, this powerful computer held the leading position. It was born thanks to the collaboration between Cray and Nvidia. Each of the 18,688 nodes of the supercomputer houses a 16-core AMD Opteron processor and an Nvidia Tesla K20X graphics card.

Titanium has found its way into Oak Ridge National Laboratory located in Tennessee. He is engaged in the design of efficient engines, in the study of biofuels, in the calculations of the effects of climate change.

Top 500

According to the compilers of this rating, which track the emergence of the most powerful computers in the world, the top ten leaders have remained unchanged since 2013. The ranking includes 233 representatives of the United States, 73 - Chinese models, three dozen supercomputers of British and Japanese production, three fewer in France, and Germany is represented by 23 computers.

Russia is represented in this rating by five machines, one of which is the Lomonosov supercomputer located at the Moscow State University. M.V., Lomonosov, with a performance of 0.9 petaflops as of November 2014, is in 58th place.

Tianhe-2

But the most powerful computer in the world deserves our immediate attention - Tianhe-2 is located in this place due to the high - 33.86 petaflops - computation speed, which is equivalent to a million billion computations per second! Such a figure is difficult for the human mind to grasp. To make it clearer, imagine that powerful technology is thirty-three million times more powerful than any iPad.

The machine contains a total of 16 thousand computing nodes, each of which consists of three 12-core Xeon Phi E5-2692 processors and two Intel processors Xeon IvyBridge. In their defense, the Chinese designers said that Intel processors were used only for the computing part of the machine, while all the rest of the filling - interconnect, RAM, secondary processors and software - are exclusively the fruits of Chinese production.

The memory capacity of the most powerful computer in the world is 1 thousand 24 TB, which exceeds the results of a conventional PC by 12 times. The supercomputer needs about 18 thousand kW of energy to operate. The total number of cores of the machine is 3 million 120 thousand. The theoretically possible performance of Tianhe-2 is about 55 thousand teraflops.

This computing equipment works on the Kylin Linux operating system. The supercomputer is located at the Defense Science and Technology University of the People's Liberation Army of China.

It was developed by the National University of Defense Technologies of the People's Republic of China in cooperation with Inspur. IN this moment the machine makes calculations in the field of climate, simulation of powerful explosions. In general, he does everything that his colleagues do. His research was applied in the development of a large airliner C919, with its help you can observe the Earth, determine the sequence of genes. It has found applications in the areas of administration, cloud computing and information services.

China spent $ 390 million to build the world's most powerful computer. Great hopes are pinned on it - the supercomputer should accelerate the development of such areas as materials science, Information Technology, military, space technology, aircraft construction.

At the moment, anti-satellite laser systems are being actively developed, new energy sources are being searched for, and many other promising developments are in the future.

Epilogue

It is not the first time in the history of supercomputers that a Chinese computer has been ranked first in the top 500. The predecessor of "Tianhe-2" in 2010 already occupied the leading line of the list, but did not stay there for long. He was ousted by computing giants from the United States and Japan. Time will tell how the influential powers will respond to China this time. But experts predict that it may take a long time to create a technique that can surpass the results of Tianhe-2.

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Scientists from different countries world are working to create the most powerful computer in the world. Every year, more and more efficient electronic computers are released, which are used for scientific purposes. The characteristics of this technique are simply amazing, and its cost reaches hundreds of millions of dollars. Next, we will find out what is the most powerful computer in the world and what are the main duties that it must perform. We will also consider the characteristics of the most productive PCs for home use.

TOP500 rating of the most powerful computers in the world

In the 90s. XX century, the idea arose to create a list of the most productive electronic computers. It first appeared in 1993 and included 500 supercomputers from around the world. Since that time, this rating has been compiled and published twice a year. To calculate the power of a particular computer, a value such as flops was introduced, which shows how many computational operations a particular machine can carry out in one second.

The creators of the rating note the fact that over the past 15 years, computer performance has increased a thousand times. If in the early 2000s the most powerful computer in the world had a computing power of 4 teraflops (four billion computational operations per second), now it is not even included in the TOP-500.

The most productive computer for the period of 2015

The leader in the production of supercomputers is the United States, which owns 233 machines from the above list. They are followed by China, Great Britain, Japan and France. Despite the leading position of the United States, the most powerful computer in the world, the photo of which is presented below, is located in the Middle Kingdom. This development of Chinese scientists was named "Tianhe-2". For three years in a row, it has occupied the first line in the ranking, displacing the American Titan car from this place. The Chinese government has spent more than $ 390 million on the creation of a supercomputer and has high hopes for it.

I would like to note that this technique has practically nothing to do with conventional laptop computers. Basically, these machines occupy a huge area equal to half a football stadium and are used only in military or scientific research.

The main parameters of "Tianhe-2"

What is so remarkable about the most powerful computer in the world? The performance of this machine is millions of times superior to even the most powerful home PCs. It is equipped with 16 thousand compute nodes, each of which is equipped with two twelve-core Xeon Phi E5-2692 processors and supplemented with three Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors. The health of each node is provided by 64 GB random access memory DDR3 and 24GB DDR5. The total number of all cores of this system reaches 3.12 million. “Tianhe-2” has a performance of 3386 teraflops, or 33.86 petaflops, almost twice overtaking its closest rival Titan (17.59 petaflops).

The world's most powerful computer running the Linux operating system is running. It also has 12.4 petabytes of storage.

The main functions of "Tianhe-2"

After the creation of the supercomputer, it was announced that it would be used only for the benefit of science, in particular for research in the field of biology and physics. But shortly thereafter, the American government announced a ban on the supply of processors from Intel, which are one of the components of this machine. This was argued by the fact that the world's most powerful computer is used to create new weapons of mass destruction, and this, in turn, could threaten the security of the United States. Perhaps this is the truth, because the Ministry of Defense of the People's Republic of China financed the Tianhe-2 project. All information about it and the results of research is kept in the strictest confidence, so it is still impossible to find out about the true purpose of the supercomputer.

Perhaps the United States specifically took such measures to slow down the pace of development of Chinese supercomputers, which displaced their American counterparts from the first line.

Powerful home computers

Now let's move from huge machines worth hundreds of millions of dollars to smaller ones for home use. While the world's most powerful computers are used for scientific purposes or to create new weapons, home PCs perform smaller tasks. First of all, they should easily cope with any video games and other resource-intensive applications. Also, this technique is used to create 3D graphics, photo and video processing. The most powerful computers can be connected to multiple monitors at the same time, which will provide comfort and convenience in work.

2015 Highest Performance PC Specs

As in the case of powerful supercomputers, home PCs are becoming more and more productive every year, and the technology that was considered top-end 2-3 years ago is now largely inferior to its younger models. So what are the characteristics of the world's most powerful computer for gaming today?

Despite the competition between Intel and AMD, the technology of the latter is inferior in power to its competitors. The most productive processor available to regular users is Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition. It has 8 physical cores clocked at 3 GHz and overclocked to 3.5 GHz.

The most important element of any gaming computer is the graphics card. For a top PC in 2015, Nvidia's recently released GeForce GTX Titan is best suited. It has 12GB of 384-bit DDR5 memory available. In conjunction with motherboard Asus Rampage V Extreme can use up to four similar video cards in one PC.

The aforementioned processor will require new DDR4 RAM, which is 40% faster than its predecessor. Its volume depends on the individual preferences of each user, but it is desirable that the PC has at least 16 GB. You also need to worry about purchasing a reliable power supply. It is advisable to use devices with a power of more than 1000 W.

The cost of the most powerful home computer

If you want maximum performance, then you have to pay a lot of money. But it's worth it, because after assembling a PC from these components, you don't have to worry about upgrading your system for many more years. You only have to pay $ 1000 for the processor itself, plus $ 1500 you need to pay for the video card. In general, the entire assembly will cost at least $ 5,000 if you use only one graphics card. When the PC is equipped with 4 video adapters, the maximum amount of RAM, hard drives and SSD drives the price will rise to 11 thousand US dollars.

In recent years, computer companies have been working tirelessly. As a result, the number of technology in the world is growing exponentially.

The most powerful computers

Until recently, the world did not know about DirectX10, and FarCry graphics or NFS Underground 2 seemed to be the pinnacle of computing power. Once a disk that could hold 600 megabytes of information seemed like a miracle of technology, but now memory cards for a terabyte are sold in the public domain.

In the realm of supercomputers, much the same thing happens. In 1993, University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra came up with the idea of ​​creating a ranking of the most powerful computers in the world. Since then, this list, called TOP500, has been updated twice a year: in June and in November.

Time passes, and the leaders of the supercomputer rating of the early 90s are already godlessly outdated, even by the standards of ordinary PC users. So, the first in 1993 was CM-5/1024, assembled by Thinking Machines: 1024 processors with a clock frequency of 32 MHz, computational speed of 59.7 gigaflops - slightly faster than an ordinary 8-core PC under your desk. What's the best computer today?

Sunway TaihuLight

Five years ago, the US-made supercomputer was steadily holding the palm in terms of power. In 2013, Chinese scientists seized the leadership and, apparently, are not going to give it up.

At the moment, the most powerful computer in the world is considered to be Sunway TaihuLight (translated as "The Divine Power of Light of Lake Taihu"), a grandiose machine with a computation speed of 93 petaflops (maximum speed - 125.43 petaflops). This is 2.5 times more powerful than the previous record holder - the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which was considered the most powerful until June 2016.

Sunway Taihulite has 10.5 million cores (40,960 processors, each with 256 computing and 4 control cores).

This is what the most powerful computer of 2016 looks like.

All equipment is designed and manufactured in China, while the processors of the most powerful computer of the past were produced by the American company Intel. Sunway TaihuLight is estimated at $ 270 million. The supercomputer is located at the Wuxi County National Supercomputer Center.

Record holders of past years

Until June 2016 (and the TOP500 list is updated every June and November), the most powerful and fastest computer was the Tianhe-2 super machine (translated from the Chinese "Milky Way"), developed in China on the basis of the Defense Science and Technology University in Changsha with the help of the company Inspur.

The capacity of Tianhe-2 provides 2507 trillion operations per second (33.86 petaflops per second), peak performance - 54.9 Petaflops. Chinese development has topped this ranking since launching in 2013 - an incredibly impressive figure!

Tianhe-2 supercomputer

The characteristics of Tianhe-2 are as follows: 16 thousand nodes, 32 thousand 12-core Intel Xeon E5-2692 processors and 48 thousand 57-core Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P accelerators, which means 3,120,000 cores in total; 256 thousand 4 GB DDR3 RAM strips and 176,000 8 GB GDDR5 strips - 2,432,000 GB of RAM in total. Volume hard disk- over 13 million GB. However, it will not work on it - it is intended solely for calculations, there is no video card installed on the Milky Way-2. In particular, it helps with calculations for the construction of metro and urban development.

Jaguar

For a long time, Jaguar, a supercomputer from the United States, was at the top of the ranking. How does it differ from the rest and what are its technical advantages?

A supercomputer called Jaguar consists of a large number of independent cells, divided into two sections - XT4 and XT5. The last section contains exactly 18688 computational cells. Each cell contains two six-core AMD processor Opteron 2356. with a frequency of 2.3 GHz, 16 GB of DDR2 RAM, as well as a SeaStar 2+ router. Even one cell from this section would be enough to create the most powerful computer for gaming. The section contains only 149504 computing cores, a huge amount of RAM - more than 300 TB, as well as 1.38 Petaflops performance and more than 6 Petabytes of disk space.

Assembling a computer monster

Section XT4 contains 7832 cells. Their characteristics are more modest than those of the previous section XT5: each cell contains one six-core processor with a frequency of 2.1 GHz, 8 GB of RAM and a SeaStar 2 router. In total, the section contains 31328 computing cores and more than 62 TB of memory, as well as a peak performance of 263 TFLOPS and over 600 TB of disk space. The Jaguar supercomputer runs on its own Cray Linux Environment operating system.

Another computer, the brainchild of IBM, the Roadrunner, breathes into the back of Jaguar. The most powerful computing monster is capable of calculating up to 1,000,000,000,000 operations per second. It was developed specifically for the energy department of the National Nuclear Security Administration in Los Alamos (or the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration). With the help of this supercomputer, it was planned to control the operation of all nuclear installations located in the United States.

The Road Runner's peak processing speed is about 1.5 petaflops. We are talking about a total capacity of 3,456 original tri-blades, each capable of about 400 billion operations per second (i.e. 400 gigaflops). Inside the Roadrunner there are about 20 thousand high-performance dual-core processors - 12,960 Cell Broadband Engine and 6948 AMD Opteron, the brainchild of IBM itself. Such a supercomputer has 80 terabytes of system memory.

So how much space does such a miracle of technology take up? The car is located on an area equal to 560 square meters. And the entire economy of the department is packed into servers of the original architecture. All equipment weighs about 23 tons. So the National Nuclear Safety Administration will need at least 21 large tractor units to transport it.

A few words about what petaflops are. One petaflops is approximately equal to the total capacity of 100,000 modern laptops. If you try to imagine, then they can line the road almost two and a half kilometers long. Another available comparison: the entire population of the planet for 46 years will use calculators to do calculations that Roadrunner can do in one day. Imagine how negligible it will take Sunway TaihuLigh, the leader of our rating?

Titan

In 2012, the Oakridge National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy launched the Titan supercomputer, designed for 20 petaflops, in other words, it can do a quadrillion floating point operations in one second.

Titan was developed by Cray. In addition to the Titan, American specialists have developed two more supercomputers in recent years. One of them - Mira - is designed for industrial and research needs, and with the help of the other - Sequoia - simulate nuclear weapons testing. IBM Corporation is behind all these developments.

The most powerful computer in Russia

Alas, the Russian development "Lomonosov-2", recognized as the most powerful computer in Russia, is only in 41st place in the TOP500 (as of June 2016). It is based at the Moscow State University Research and Computing Center. The power of the domestic supercomputer is 1,849 petaflops, the peak power is about 2.5 petaflops. Number of cores: 42,688.

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Technology develops and improves every day and computers are no exception. Your computers become obsolete before our very eyes if you buy Personal Computer from good characteristics, then in a few years it will be considered a rarity. The most powerful computers from the beginning of the 21st century will not make it into the top 500 most powerful computers of 2010. In this regard, we will present you with the three most powerful computers on Earth. Such computers are unlikely to be able to stand in your home in 2-3 years, but in 15-20 years it is possible that the dimensions of such machines decrease to a desktop PC.

A computer straight from Germany, its capacity can be approximately equal to the sum of the capacities of 50 thousand ordinary computers. The computer consists of 72 blocks, each of which is the size of a telephone booth. The power consumption is very modest - only 2.2 MW. Peak performance JUGENE 1 petaflops.

The second representative of modern supercomputers Jaguar... It contains tremendous power: the first section contains 18688 cells, each of which contains 2 six-core processors with a frequency of 2.3 MHz. and 16 GB of RAM. (The characteristics of one such cell are comparable to those of a powerful gaming PC) The second section contains 7832 cells, each containing one six-core processor with a frequency of 2.1 MHz and the amount of RAM is 8 GB. The Jaguar computer uses its own operating system Cray Linux.

The computer has slightly less than 180,000 cores, each with an average frequency of just over 2.25 MHz. The amount of RAM is 362 TB. The amount of disk space is 6.6 petabytes.

And the third monster of the calculator family IBM ROADRUNNER... Computer performance 1.026 petaflops (1.026 quadrillion operations per second). The volume of RAM is 80 TB, such a computer weighs 255 tons, costs $ 133 million and consumes 4 MW of electricity, the total length of connection cables is 88 kilometers.