Tianhe-2
Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (Chinese: 天河-2; pinyin: tiānhé-èr; lit. 'Heavenriver-2', i.e. 'Milky Way 2') is a 33.86-petaflops supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.
| Sponsors | 863 Program |
|---|---|
| Location | National Supercomputer Center, Guangzhou, China |
| Architecture | 32,000 Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C with 2.200 GHz 48,000 Xeon Phi 31S1P |
| Power | 17.6 MW (24 MW with cooling) |
| Operating system | Kylin Linux |
| Memory | 1,375 TiB (1,000 TiB CPU and 375 TiB coprocessor) |
| Storage | 12.4 PB |
| Speed | 33.86 PFLOPS |
| Cost | 2.4 billion Yuan (US$390 million) |
| Purpose | Simulation, analysis, and government security applications. |
It was the world's fastest supercomputer according to the TOP500 lists for June 2013, November 2013, June 2014, November 2014, June 2015, and November 2015. The record was surpassed in June 2016 by the Sunway TaihuLight. In 2015, plans of the Sun Yat-sen University in collaboration with Guangzhou district and city administration to double its computing capacities were stopped by a U.S. government rejection of Intel's application for an export license for the CPUs and coprocessor boards.
In response to the U.S. sanction, China introduced the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in 2016, which substantially outperforms the Tianhe-2 (and also affected the update of Tianhe-2 to Tianhe-2A replacing US tech), and in November 2022 ranks eighth in the TOP500 list while using completely domestic technology including the Sunway manycore microprocessor.