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China set to claim supercomputing crown

MOD-656188_Tianjin1.jpgIn a potential blow to US national pride the world’s fastest supercomputer is now Chinese, beating the Americans into second place for the first time since 2004 with a machine which is smaller and more energy efficient than its closest US rival.

In the run up to the release of the official list of the top 500 supercomputers next week the Chinese supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, looks certain to occupy the top spot.

Tianhe-1A, which means ‘Milky Way’, has clocked up 2.5 petaflops – equivalent to roughly two and a half quadrillion (or 2.5 × 1015) calculations every second, making it almost 50% faster than the Cray Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee – the US’s fastest supercomputer – which can only muster a comparatively feeble 1.75 petaflops.

Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings told the New York Times that Tianhe-1A “blows away” the competition. “We don’t close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster,” he said.


Tianhe-1A was developed by the Chinese National University of Defence Technology and is located at the National Supercomputer Centre in Tianjin. It includes 7,168 graphics chips and 14,336 central processing chips, all ironically made by US firms Nvidia and Intel. Using the powerful graphics chips allows Tianhe-1A to be smaller – it would take around 50,000 ordinary chips to achieve the same power.

Networking technology developed by Chinese researchers to transfer information between the smaller computers which make up Tianhe-1A is the primary reason this machine outpaces its US rival. The data is shuttled around at about twice the speed of the most commonly used networking technology, Infiniband.

Supercomputers are used to solve problems in defense, energy, finance and science. China has been working hard to try and outpace the US in this area, investing billions of dollars, and it seems to be succeeding – Dongarra says another computer likely to appear in the top five is also Chinese.

This is not the first time the US has been beaten in supercomputer speeds. Japan surprised the world in 2002 by revealing a machine that was faster than the top 20 US supercomputers combined. They held on to the top spot until it was regained by the US in 2004.

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    morristhewise said:

    With the creation of the worlds fastest computer China no longer will be thought of as the land of cheap labor, but also as a land inhabited by the worlds fastest thinkers. Research and development was once monopolized by the US and it was the leader in the race for new products, but a yellow horse has now taken the lead. Unless the US regains its once creative workforce, it will finish out of the money.

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