The Kobe based Riken Advanced Institute For Computational Science has a supercomputer capable of 8.16 petaflops of computational power, which has reclaimed the #1 spot in the Top 500 list. The new machine has handsomely widened the gap from the now #2 Chinese Tianhe 1A which delivers almost a quarter of the computational capacity at 2.57 petaflops.
The last time Japan held the #1 spot was in 2004 with their Earth Simulator. The new supercomputer, dubbed the K Computer, uses only CPUs to deliver the massive 8.16 petaflops. It does not use any GPUs or other accelerators. It is comprised of 68,544 eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors which equals 548,352 individual cores. When the machine is commissioned, it will be capable of even higher performance and will deliver more than 10 petaflops using 80,000 of the eight core SPARC CPUs (640,000 cores).
This behemoth comes at a price though. It uses a whopping 10MW of power. This is almost two and a half times the power used by the existing top ten systems at 4.3 MW.
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