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| Science & Technology |
| Chinese supercomputer is world's fastest |
| 2010-11-15 |
| CHINA overtook the US at the head of the world of supercomputing today when a survey ranked one of its machines the fastest on the planet. Tianhe-1, meaning Milky Way, achieved a computing speed of 2570 trillion calculations per second, earning it the number one spot in the Top 500 (www.top500.org) survey of supercomputers. The Jaguar computer at a US government facility in Tennessee, which had held the top spot, was ranked second with a speed of 1750 trillion calculations per second. Tianhe-1 does its warp-speed "thinking" at the National Centre for Supercomputing in the northern port city of Tianjin - using mostly chips designed by US companies. Another Chinese system, the Nebulae machine at the National Supercomputing Centre in the southern city of Shenzhen, came in third. The US still dominates, with more than half of the entries in the Top 500 list, but China now boasts 42 systems in the rankings, putting it ahead of Japan, France, Germany and Britain. It is not the first time that the US has had its digital crown stolen by an Asian upstart. In 2002, Japan made a machine with more power than the top 20 American computers put together. The supercomputers on the Top 500 list, which is produced twice a year, are rated based on speed of performance in a benchmark test by experts from Germany and the US. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #4 ...and used in medical studies, for which in this case is studying the action of proteins. Stanford has coordinated the use of personal computers and Playstations to crunch numbers. The distributive network of Playstations from peoples homes provides support that is currently generating around 1650 TFLOPs of processing. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2010-11-15 09:20 |
| #3 They will actually use it. However, the design may not in fact generate more throughput than the IBM supercomputers deliverd to the NNSA and others. And it generates a lot more heat. |
| Posted by: lotp 2010-11-15 08:49 |
| #2 My brother's supercomputers are used to to predict the weather, Redneck Jim. Supercomputers also seem to make themselves useful for engineering (civil, industrial, material, chemical), biomedical research, physics and astronomy, etc., at least according to one of his recent research grants. He is able justify building a newer, bigger, faster one every three to five years, and has found a ready market for his old ones. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2010-11-15 08:33 |
| #1 OK, I have to ask. Is this simply to obtain the record (Pride) or are they actually using this supercomputer? And if so, for WHAT? I can think of only a very few legitimate reasons to use something that fast, and NONE deal with Commerce. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2010-11-15 08:05 |