The world’s fastest supercomputer is Chinese

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CHINA – The world’s fastest supercomputer has been unveiled by China, asserting itself as a global technology power. The creation of the machine called Tianhe-1A thus supplants the U.S. as the creator of the most powerful machine.

chinese petaflop supercomputer
What a Petaflop computer looks like

Tianhe, which means “milky way,” was created at a research center at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China. According to a New York Times report, the machine is 1.4 times faster than Cray XT5 Jaguar, the now second fastest supercomputer that is housed at a Tennessee national lab.

NUDT said that the computer’s peak performance can hit 1.206 petaflops and runs at 563.1 teraflops using the Linpack benchmark developed by University of Tennessee computer scientist Jack Dongarra. The system weighs 155 tons and has 103 cabinets that cover 1,000 square meters. Tianhe-1A’s record speed is reached using 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs.

Created by 200 computer scientists over two years, Tianhe-1A cost $88 million and consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity. NUDT said it will be used “to process seismic data for oil exploration, conduct biomedical computing, and [to] help design aerospace vehicles.”

Officials from NUDT unveiled the lightning-fast machine Thursday at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing in Beijing. Its release is especially timely. The official list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers is released every six months, and it’s set to be published next month. Dongorra told the Times that China’s computer “blows away the existing number one machine.”

The U.S. was unseated from the spot briefly in 2002 when Japan presented a “machine with more horsepower than the top 20 American computers combined,” the Times report said. Until now, the U.S. was the top dog after reclaiming the number one rank in 2004.

The June 2010 top 500 list includes 291 U.S. machines, 145 from Europe, and 49 from Asia, NUDT said. Twenty of these machines are from China while U.S. supercomputers comprise the top 10.

To put that kind of power in perspective, Tianhe-1A can do in one day what a basic dual-core PC would take 160 years to achieve working continuously, NUDT said.

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Holte Ender

Holte Ender will always try to see your point of view, but sometimes it is hard to stick his head that far up his @$$.
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13 years ago

For anybody that is interested, here is a visual progression of computing power…comment image

13 years ago

Invade China!

Jess
13 years ago

Yeah but will it write the collected works of Shakespeare and paint the Mona Lisa? Oh yeah, get ready to hear that question from some of our citizens here. I speak teabag so I channel them once in a while. It’s kind of like a verbal tic I have. Oh and this is just for… he knows who he is. GO GIANTS.

Jess
Reply to  Holte Ender
13 years ago

🙂 Eli Manning. Maybe I need to put SF before Giants so people know it’s baseball not football I am talking huh? I’m not a football follower at all. Only thing I know about Eli is he has a brother and they did some Oreo commercial. That’s my knowledge of him.

Reply to  Holte Ender
13 years ago

I predict that the future Internet and it’s supporting computational power will become self aware in less than 50 years. I am not alone in that prediction either…

Jess
Reply to  Krell
13 years ago

I hope I’m dead by that time.

Reply to  Jess
13 years ago

Not to be morbid but what if it was possible to record all of your thoughts and neuron processes?

Would you want that to happen?

Your complete consciousness and thought patterns recorded so that you essentially live forever, well as long as somebody kept paying the electric bill.

Would life be worth living without the physical? My answer is no, but I am curious as to other peoples thoughts. Eh??

Jess
Reply to  Krell
13 years ago

Not me, when I die it will be the time for finally getting some well deserved rest from thinking. I think I would like to keep it that way.

13 years ago

Seymour Cray would be rolling in his grave right now!

Most of the super computers in this country are at the NSA headquarters or at Sandia or Oak Ridge for Nuclear Simulations.

In fact, the largest concentration of supercomputers and also the most hired professional mathematicians are at the Fort Meade NSA headquarters.

The Chinese may have create the current fastest, but they did it by paralleling processor chips designed in the good ole USA.

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