China Makes World's Fastest Supercomputer

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."

Comments

Re:Good on the Chinese

[betterunixthanunix]

Competitive in what, exactly? We have many supercomputers in the USA; we have no idea what to do with them, though, and many of them are spending a lot of time idle. Some supercomputers are now being rented out to investors, because the people the computers were built for -- the scientists -- are not using enough computer time.

What we really need to do is look at the state of research in this country. Also, maybe if we had a more solid economic base, one in which we solve the trade imbalance by exporting real goods rather than copyrights, we could spend more money on science and supercomputing. Oh well, in your words, "who am I kidding?"