A Chinese university has built the world’s fastest supercomputer, almost doubling the speed of the US machine that previously claimed the top spot on the TOP500 list, and underlining China’s rise as a science and technology powerhouse.
The semiannual listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers says the Tianhe-2, developed by the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. That’s the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.
The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the US Energy Department’s Titan machine off the Number One spot; it merely achieved 17.59 petaflops per second. Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modeling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions, and designing jetliners.
It’s the second time a Chinese computer has been named the world’s fastest. In November of 2010, the Tianhe-2′s predecessor, Tianhe-1A, had that honor before Japan’s K computer overtook it a few months later on ist, a ranking on the TOP500 list curated by three computer scientists at universities in the US and Germany.
The Tianhe-2 shows how China is leveraging rapid economic growth and sharp increases in research spending to join the United States, Europe, and Japan in the global technology elite. “Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part,” TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra, who toured the Tianhe-2 facility in May of 2013, said in a news release. “That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors, and software are mainly Chinese.”
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