By: TOP500 Team

It has been somewhat difficult to ascertain what problems the fastest supercomputer on the planet has been chewing on since it was announced in 2013, but there are some signs that China is now pinning the machine’s mission on the future of genomics, among other areas.

This July, the bi-annual list of the top systems in the world will refresh, and there is little doubt that with well over 33 petaflops of sustained performance (and approximately 54 petaflops peak capability) at the ready, boosted by 16,000 nodes that sport two Ivy Bridge generation processors and backed with three Xeon Phi coprocessors, the 3,120,000 core beast will retain its spot at the top. But the same questions about how the machine is being used—and more specifically, how China is doing the software legwork to be able to fully leverage such a monolith—will likely resurface during the list unveiling at ISC 2015 in Frankfurt.

It is safe to assume plenty of what happens on TIanhe-2 stays within hushed circles, but what a team has been able to showcase promises a big breakthrough for genetic research and demonstrates how application teams are rallying to meet the demands and opportunities of dramatic core count, memory allocation, storage, and other resources boosts, not to mention the needs to keep the machines fully fed.

Read the full article on The Platform.