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China Makes World's Fastest Supercomputer

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the but-can-it-run-wolf3d dept.

shmG writes "China has replaced the United States as the maker of the world's fastest supercomputer. A Chinese research center has made the world's faster super computer — named as Tianhe-1A, which was released at a national conference on high-performance computers (HPC) in China. Made at a cost of over $88 million, Tianhe-1A is theoretically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A 's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops, and it runs at 563.1 teraflops (1,000 teraflops is equal to one petaflop) on the Linpack benchmark."

6 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Fastest Train and Computer are in China by digitaldc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And the fastest social and economic downturn is in America...coincidence?

    --
    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
    1. Re:Fastest Train and Computer are in China by the_humeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oh my. When have I heard this before? Oh yes, back in the 1980s when there was panic and hyperbole over Japan, Inc. overtaking the USA in everything. How did that pan out exactly? I don't see how the current situation with China is any different.

  2. Re:Good on the Chinese by hsmith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, lets borrow more money from the Chinese Government so we can build a useless supercomputer to outdo them - just to say we did it! Thanks, grandkids!

  3. Re:Worthless stunt by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Insightful

    we went to the moon during a period of nationalist chest thumping, and when the nationalist chest thumping subsided, we haven't been back. countries that are interested in nationalist chest thumping: china, india, etc, are still pumping up their space programs

    what i am saying is, for all the evils of nationalism, scientific advancement in the realm of large projects seems to be a positive byproduct

    for example, if we were still in a cold war with the ussr in the 1990s, i will bet you anything that this would have been completed and would be producing amazing science at this point in time:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  4. China lies. by rafter109 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is absolutely no consistency in numbers in this story. Some measurements show this computer to be about 45% slower than the Cray XT5 and some show it to be faster. Given China's history of arbitrarily throwing out numbers to try to prop themselves up in the international community I cannot accept this as fact without some sort of independent verification. If China has in fact created the worlds fastest supercomputer, I congratulate them on a job well done. But I am still skeptical about this story. Sounds like my government (US) is just looking for an excuse to spend billions more on a new supercomputer.

  5. Uh - China didn't "make" it, they "assembled" it by Emperor+Shaddam+IV · · Score: 4, Insightful

    China: "We made the fastest super-computer!!!"

    Intel and NVidia: "Uh - no you didn't, We are own all your processors!!!"