Top 5 Supercomputers inthe World

As compared to the PC that you may be using, supercomputers are thousands of times more powerful, in terms of processing power and processing speed. This is why most humans have displayed immense interest in supercomputers. The first supercomputer was created in the 1960s and these advanced machines have come a long way since then. To give you a better idea, here are five of the most powerful supercomputers that humanity has developed till date.

No: 5 – Titan: This supercomputer was developed by Cray at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in United States. Titan uses 18,688 AMD Opteron 6274 16-core CPUs and has a theoretical peak of 27 petaFLOPS. Titan is being used for various complex calculations such as those associated with nuclear reaction, molecular physics, advanced simulation, climate &environment predictions, space research, etc.

No: 4 – Gyoukou: This supercomputer was developed in Japan by ExaScaler and PEZY Computing. Gyoukou is installed at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). Gyoukou utilizes ZettaScaler-2.2 system and has 10,000 PEZY-SC2 processor modules. It offers a theoretical peak of 19,135.8 teraflops. Gyoukou features an innovative liquid cooling system, which is a remarkable development in the world of supercomputers.

No: 3 – Piz Daint: This supercomputer was developed in Switzerland and is installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. It gets its name from the mountain Piz Daint, which is located in the Swiss Alps. It’s interconnect configuration is based on Aries routing and communications ASIC, and Dragonfly network topology. Piz Daint has a theoretical peak of 25.326 petaFLOPS. This is the most powerful supercomputer in Europe.

No: 2 – Tianhe-2: Also called TH-2, this supercomputer was developed by China.  Tianhe-2 is installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou. The architecture of this supercomputer comprises 32,000 Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C with 2.200 GHz 48,000 Xeon Phi 31S1P. Tianhe-2 was developed by a massive tech team comprising around 1,300 scientists and engineers. It offers a theoretical peak of 33.86 petaFlops.

No: 1 – Sunway TaihuLight: At number 1 is the Chinese supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight. This is installed at the National Supercomputer Center, Wuxi, Jiangsu. This supercomputer is based on Sunway architecture and it utilizes 40,960 Chinese-designed SW26010 manycore 64-bit RISC processors. Sunway TaihuLight has been developed at a cost of US$273 million. It offers a theoretical peak of 125 petaFLOPS, which is truly amazing. Sunway TaihuLight is being used for various purposes such as oil prospecting, life sciences, weather forecast, industrial design, and pharmaceutical research.