Top three fastest supercomputers in the world – Here's how they compare to your computer.
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When it comes to computers, it's all about the FLOPS or floating-point operations per second. It’s basically a unit of measure of processing performance. At present, the best commercial computer have outputs about 10 teraflops. With that kind of power you'd be able to run some serious high-end programs or play the latest games in highest 4K resolution and 3D rendering without any degrade in performance. Although that may be the most an average consumer can hope for, it still dwarfs in comparison with some of the mightiest supercomputers in the world. Let's have a look.
1. Sunway TaihuLight
This supercomputer — the planet’s most powerful computer right now — was developed in China with the computing power of a colossal 93 petaflop/s on the LINPACK benchmark. The supercomputer was created by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and is located in the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. With an efficiency of 6,051.30 MFLOPS/W, this juggernaut is also the fourth most energy-efficient supercomputer.
2. Tianhe-2
The Tianhe-2 — also known as MilkyWay-2 — comes in at second place. Another hard-hitter from China, this supercomputer is capable of 33.8 petaflop/s, although the Tianhe-2 could theoretically reach 54.9 petaflop/s. Using Intel technology, this computer has 3.1 million cores and 1,024,000 GB of internal memory.The Tianhe-2 is located at the National Super Computer Centre in Guangzhou, China. The supercomputer was built with a combined effort from China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and an IT firm called Inspur.
3. Titan
Located in Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, US, Titan comes in at third place. Developed by Cray Inc, this supercomputer has 560,640 cores, with a computing capacity of 17.5 petaflop/s, and 710,144 GB memory. The US Department of Energy footed the $60 million development price tag.
