It is powered by Intel's Knights Landing PCIe coprocessors

Jun 18, 2013 06:54 GMT  ·  By

Intel has used the opportunity provided by the International Supercomputing Conference to once again affirm its dominance on the high-performance computing market. Which is to say, it has powered the strongest supercomputer ever.

The TOP500 list of supercomputers gets updated twice a year. Sometimes, the leading system is powered by AMD, and sometimes by Intel.

This is one of the latter situations. Through a combination of Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing coprocessors, the Milky Way 2 is over twice as powerful as the previous list leader (the one from November 2012).

To be more specific, the Milky Way 2, based in the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou, China, utilizes 32,000 Intel Xeon processors and 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.

Together, the units work at a combined 54.9 PFlops (54.9 quadrillion floating point operations per second).

Interestingly, Milky Way 2 is the first exclusively Intel-based system to take the top spot on the list since 1997.

Intel calls the combination of x86 CPUs and coprocessors “neo-heterogeneous architecture.”

The total system power is of 17.8 MW (megawatts), which is surprisingly low really.

It bears noting that the upcoming Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 used here also powers the systems holding the 54th and 329th spots (with 557 Tflops and 139 Tflops top performance, respectively).

For those who want to know more about the E5-2600 v2, they are units based on Ivy Bridge 22nm architecture.

Other features of the Milky Way 2 include 1 PB (petabyte) of random access memory (RAM) and a global shared parallel storage capacity of 12.4 PB, divided amongst 162 compute/communications/storage cabinets.

More specifically, there are 125 compute cabinets, 13 communications cabinets, and 24 storage cabinets. In theory, the supercomputer should be able to scale to 10,000-100,000 nodes.

Milky Way 2 will be used for life sciences, geophysical, weather and big data analytics.

Photo Gallery (4 Images)

Intel powers Milky Way 2 supercomputer
Intel powers Milky Way 2 supercomputerIntel powers Milky Way 2 supercomputer
+1more