The Most 'Powerful' Supercomputers In The World, Powered By Linux!

Well, computers are passe, it's the age of supercomputers! Although some of them have been around for sometime now, it's remarkable how these elegant pieces of gadgetry can take you by storm (literally as well as practically). Supercomputers are not a new concept anymore, they are being increasingly used to investigate new materials, monitor climate change and its after effects, so on and so forth. What is important for us is that most of them have the friendly neighborhood Linux kernel beating under the hood!

1.Tianhe-2

Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (literally "Skyriver-2", idiomatically "Milky Way 2") is a 33.86 petaflops supercomputer located in Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1300 scientists and engineers. It is the world's fastest supercomputer according to the TOP500 list for June and November 2013. The development of Tianhe-2 was sponsored by the 863 High Technology Program, initiated by the Chinese government, the government of Guangdong 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.

2.K Computer

The K computer is a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, currently installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. The K computer is based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 computer nodes. It is used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. The K computer's operating system is based on the Linux kernel, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware.

3.IBM Mira

Mira is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. It has a performance of 8.16 petaflops and consumes 3.9 MW in power. The supercomputer was constructed by IBM for Argonne National Laboratory's Argonne Leadership Computing Facility with the support of the United States Department of Energy, and partially funded by the National Science Foundation. Mira will be used for scientific research, including studies in the fields of material science, climatology, seismology, and computational chemistry. The supercomputer is being utilised initially for sixteen projects, selected by the Department of Energy.

4.Titan

Titan is a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan is an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs). It is the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. Titan employs AMD Opteron CPUs in conjunction with Nvidia Tesla GPUs to improve energy efficiency while providing an order of magnitude increase in computational power over Jaguar. It uses 18,688 CPUs paired with an equal number of GPUs to perform at a theoretical peak of 27 petaFLOPS

5.IBM Sequoia

IBM Sequoia is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). Record-breaking science applications have been run on Sequoia, the first to cross 10 petaflops of sustained performance. The entire supercomputer runs on Linux, with CNK running on over 98,000 nodes, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on 768 I/O nodes that are connected to the filesystem

6.Stampede

Stampede is one of the most powerful machines in the world for open science research. Funded by the National Science Foundation Grant ACI-1134872 and built in partnership with Intel, Dell and Mellanox, Stampede went into production on 7 January, 2013. Stampede comprises 6400 nodes, 102400 cpu cores, 205 TB total memory, 14 PB total and 1.6 PB local storage. The bulk of the cluster consists of 160 racks of primary compute nodes, each with dual Xeon E5-2680 8-core processors, Xeon Phi coprocessor, and 32 GB ram. The cluster also contained 16 nodes with 32 cores and 1 TB ram each, 128 "standard" compute nodes with Nvidia Kepler K20 GPUs, and other nodes for I/O (to a Lustre filesystem), login, and cluster management. Stampede can complete 9.6 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

7.SuperMUC

SuperMUC will be the successor of the Höchstleistungsrechner Bayern II (HLRB II). The SuperMUC will have 18,432 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge-EP processors running in IBM System x iDataPlex servers with a total of 147,456 cores and a peak performance of about 3 petaFLOPS. The main memory will be 288 terabytes together with 12 petabytes of hard disk space based on the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS). It will also use a new form of cooling that IBM developed, called Aquasar, that uses hot water to cool the processors, a design that should cut cooling electricity usage by 40 percent, IBM claims.

8.JUQUEEN

JUQUEEN at the Forschungzentrum Jülich is a 28-rack Blue Gene/Q system. It will have a peak performance of about 5,872 Tflops. JUQUEEN runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

Author : Shivam Kotwalia, CodeKill