New TOP500 List Pushes the Limits

Massive Chinese supercomputer sets the pace for further HPC development.

The June 2013 TOP500 supercomputer was unveiled at the International Supercomputing conference in Leipzig, Germany. As expected, the phenomenal new Chinese computer known as Tianhe-2 (or Milky Way-2) led the list with a peak performance of 33.86 PetaFLOPS.

The list of the top 500 supercomputers is published twice per year and is based on the system's performance with the Linpack benchmark, which is intended to measure the system's capacity for floating-point computations. The latest list is the 41st in the series. This list reveals 26 systems with performance greater than 1 petaFLOPS, up from 23 six months ago. Of the 500 systems, 252 reside in the USA, 112 are in Europe, and 119 are in Asia. See the complete list at the TOP500 website, or check out the press release.