Tianhe-2

Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (Chinese: 天河-2; pinyin: tiānhé-èr; literally: "Heavenriver-2", that is, "Milky Way 2") is a 33.86-petaflop supercomputer located in National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.

It is the world's fastest supercomputer according to the TOP500 lists for June 2013, November 2013, June 2014, November 2014, June 2015, and November 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 US government rejection of Intel's application for an export license for the CPUs and coprocessor boards. The Wall Street Journal analysts considered this a blow to Intel and their suppliers sales and a drag to US information technology development, but concurrently a boost for China's own processor development and production industry.

History

The development of Tianhe-2 was sponsored by the 863 High Technology Program, initiated by the Chinese government, the government of Guangdong province, and the government of Guangzhou city. It was built by China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in collaboration with the Chinese IT firm Inspur. Inspur manufactured the printed circuit boards and helped with the installation and testing of the system software. The project was originally scheduled for completion in 2015, but was instead declared operational in June 2013. As of June 2013, the supercomputer had yet to become fully operational. It was expected to reach its full computing capabilities by the end of 2013.