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Fastest computer breaking records

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-29 07:55

BEIJING - China's Tianhe-1 computer has overtaken China's Nebulae to take the top fast computer spot, according to a new list of the country's top 100 supercomputers released on Thursday.

Back in June, the Nebulae was in second place in the world, after the United States' Jaguar system, while the Tianhe-1 was in a lowly seventh place on the biannual world TOP 500 list.

The Tianhe-1 (Chinese for Milky Way) is in the National Center for Supercomputing, in the port city of Tianjin. It has a sustained computing speed of 2,507 trillion calculations per second. That is 2.507 petaflops per second (PFlop/s), with one petaflop equivalent to 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

A researcher working on Tianhe-1 said it has a theoretical speed of 4.7 PFlop/s.

The Nebulae, in Shenzhen, is capable of a sustained computing speed of 1.271 PFlop/s on the Linpack benchmark, which is a means of ranking the world's top 500 supercomputers.

The US is the leader in the world of supercomputing and is home to more than half of the top 500. The Jaguar, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a speed of 1.75 PFlop/s.

In the new Tianhe-1, upgraded Intel CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and new Chinese FeiTeng-1000 CPUs have been installed, the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), its developer, has said.

It has been put to trial use by possible clients like the Tianjin Meteorological Bureau.

"It could also serve the animation industry and bio-medical research," Liu Guangming, the head of Tianjin's National Center for Supercomputing, has pointed out.

The NUDT created Tianhe-1 in 2009, with a sustained computing speed of 0.5631 PFlop/s, making it the fastest supercomputer in China at the time.

Its new technical data have been submitted to the world Top 500 list. The next world list is due out in November.