I guess the problems that it worked on can be partitioned into a large number of sub-problems that can be solved independently. I wonder of the compiler partitions the problems or if that has to be done in the coding.
From phys.org:
(Phys.org) —How is this for bragging rights in the always-on title grab for the world's fastest supercomputer: China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, aka Milkyway-2, recently measured at speeds of 31 petaflops (30.65) out of a theoretical peak of 49.19. The kicker is that it was not even running at full capacity. The fastest result was only using 90 percent of the machine. The stats come from a five-hour Linpack test using 14,336 nodes and 50 GB of memory of each node. (The Linpack benchmark is a measure of a computer's floating-point rate of execution. It is determined by running a computer program that solves a system of linear equations.) The numbers were revealed by University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who introduced the Linpack benchmarks, and who helps compile the biannual Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
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The Dongarra report on the Tianhe-2 talked about its hardware and software stack. As for Intel features, the computer is built with Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi processors—32,000 Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon sockets and 48,000 Xeon Phi boards. The computer has about twice as much memory as the Titan system, and its own custom interconnect network.
Dongarra in describing the interconnect said that the "TH Express-2 uses a fat tree topology with 13 switches each of 576 ports at the top level." He called it an optoelectronics hybrid transport technology.
As for operating system, the Tianhe-2 is using Kylin Linux. Kylin is compatible with other operating systems and supports multiple microprocessors. He also listed "Fortran, C, C++, and Java compilers, OpenMP, and MPI 3.0 based on MPICH version 3.0.4 with custom GLEX (Galaxy Express) Channel support."
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