In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at China's massive upgrade of the Tianhe-2A supercomputer to 95 Petaflops peak performance. As detailed in a new 21-page report by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, the upgrade should nearly double the performance of the system, which is currently ranked at #2 on TOP500 with 33.86 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark. The upgraded system, dubbed Tianhe -2A, should be completed in the coming months. Details about the system upgrade were presented at the conference opening session. While the current system derives much of its performance from Intel Knights Corner co-processors, the new system swaps these PCI devices out for custom-made 4-way MATRIX-2000 boards, with each chip providing 2.46 Teraflops of peak performance. After that, we do our Catch of the Week: Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed