World's Fastest Super-Computer Is Developed By China - Tianhe-2


A Chinese university has built the world's fastest supercomputer by almost doubling the speed of the US machine that previously claimed the top spot and underlining China's rise as a science and technology powerhouse.




 The architecture behind the Tinahe-2 (also known as Milky Way-2) is based on Intel's new Xeon Phi architecture which combines a large number of x86 cores into a single chip; the supercomputer then combines those chips into a single architecture. The competition with systems based mostly on GPU computing. Indeed, a system based on Nvidia's CUDA GPU cores, which topped the list last time, is now in second place.




The Tianhe-2, which is based at the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, China, shows sustained performance of more than 33.8 petaflops (more than 17,500 trillion floating point operations per second) and peak performance of 54.9 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark.

Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modelling 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 2010, the Tianhe-2's predecessor, Tianhe-1A, had that honour before Japan's K computer overtook it a few months later on the TOP500 list, a ranking curated by three computer scientists at universities in the U.S. 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, said in a news release. "That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese."

Popular posts from this blog

Military Standard Rugged Android 4.1 Phone

Sapphire Displays by Apple

gStick: A Pen Shaped Mouse