Supercomputing for Everyone

With the aid of the Chinese military, Intel has won itself big bragging rights: the world’s fastest supercomputer runs entirely on Intel semiconductors. It is the first time in 15 years, Intel says, that an all-Intel machine has held top honors. More important is what this news says about computing: the kind of work done by supercomputers is increasingly applicable to the kind of work done by business. Intel doesn’t want to sell its biggest computers to researchers and the world’s armies; it wants to sell them to companies like Amazon for its Amazon Web Services. Intel believes that many ordinary businesses, possibly even consumers, will soon be accessing what were once the most expensive and rarefied computers.

The new computer, called a Tianhe-2, or Milkyway-2, was built at the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, China. At its peak, it can perform at a speed of nearly 55 petaflops – with a petaflop akin to one thousand trillion instructions per second. The previous record-holder, announced last November, had a peak performance of 27.1 petaflops. Five years ago, a single petaflop machine was record-breaking. In addition to the usual supercomputing tasks like weather analysis or geophysical research, makers of the new supercomputer also listed its capabilities for Big Data analysis. The Tianhe-2 can process 600 terabytes of data on just 1,024 of its 16,000 computing nodes.