Two years ahead of expected deployment, China’s Tianhe-2 has claimed the top spot on the Top500 List with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s, nearly twice that of second-place Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The newcomer also boasts 3,120,000 cores, approximately twice that of the previous core-count record holder, Sequoia, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This is indeed disruptive news, as normally when there is a new king of the hill, it is taken by only a small fraction of performance over the trumped system, not a factor of nearly 100%.
The next anticipated potential List-topper is Trinity, and should be online by 2015.