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Science/Technology
Science/Technology
UPDATED: November 15, 2010
China Builds World's Fastest Supercomputer
Although the computing power of Tianhe-1A has surpassed Jaguar, its storage is not keeping the pace
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China has been confirmed as the creator of the world's fastest super computer. The Tianhe-1A is capable of 2.67 quadrillions of computing operations per second, pulling ahead of the United States in the global supercomputing race.

The lead of the China-made system was confirmed by the 36th edition of TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, which was released hours ago on the TOP500 list website.

Tianhe-1A was followed by the former No. 1 system, the U.S.-made Cray XT5 "Jaguar" system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee. The Jaguar performs at 1.75 quadrillions per second, 92 percent slower than the Tianhe-1A, running Linpack, the benchmark used to officially determine the speed of supercomputers.

China also occupied third place with Nebulae, a 1.27 petaflop per-second system which was installed in the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen.

Jack Dongarra, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and supervisor of the TOP500 list, said in an email interview with Xinhua, that "It's more of a sign that China is serious in pursuing high performance computing to aid the growth of science, engineering and economic competitiveness."

"The long-term implication for the U.S. is that China is seriously interested in high performance computing, and is developing and deploying computing resources," said Dongarra, who lead research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Among the world's most powerful 100, China holds five seats, while out of the 500 list, China-made systems occupy at least 40 slots.

Tianhe-1A, is estimated to have cost 600 million yuan ($90.4 million) and was developed by the Changsha-based National University of Defense Technology. It employs 14,336 Intel Xeon X5670 central processing units (CPU) and 7,168 NVidia Tesla M2050 graphic processing units (GPU), as well as more than 2,000 home-grown Feiteng CPUs.

Zhang Yunquan, a lead computing scientist at the Chinese Academy of Science, told Xinhua, "The international supercomputing competition is extremely fierce and it's very difficult for China to hold the top position for more than one year."

Zhang Zhe, a researcher who works at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said, "Although the computing power of Tianhe-1A has surpassed Jaguar, its storage is not keeping the pace."

Jaguar adopts an external file system with 10 petabytes, or 10 quadrillion bytes, of information storage capacity, while Tianhe-1A is only two petabytes.

(Xinhua News Agency November 15, 2010)



 
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