MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, retained its position as the world’s No. 1 system with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark, according to the 42nd edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The list was announced Nov. 18 at the SC13 conference in Denver, Colo.
Berkeley Lab scientist Erich Strohmaier created the first TOP500 list of supercomputers in June 1993 with Professor Hans Meuer. Updated twice annually, the list serves as the industry inventory of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Currently, Dr. Strohmaier is the head of the Future Technologies Group at Berkeley Lab, where his team studies the design and development of hardware and software systems that allow application scientists to more effectively use high-end machines. In this “10 Questions,” Dr. Strohmaier discusses the evolution of the TOP500 list, his own career and where the field of high performance computing is going next.