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Chinese Tianhe-1A Supercomputer Starts Churning Out the Science

Posted by Soulskill on from the thousands-of-feynmans-per-hour dept.

gupg writes "When China built the world's fastest supercomputer based on NVIDIA GPUs last year, a lot of naysayers said this was just a stunt machine. Well, guess what — here comes the science! They are working on better material for solar panels and they ran the world's fastest simulation ever. NVIDIA (whose GPUs accelerate these applications as a co-processor) blogged on this a while ago, where they talk about how the US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing."

2 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. has HPC really done anything useful? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I only know of minor successes in materials engineering and genetics but even those weren't very commercially successful. A course I took at MIT about 6 years ago the professor was talking about saving 10 million for Ford using HPC materials engineering modelling but 10 million isn't very impressive. I always hear HPC "is working on" a bunch of exciting sounding stuff but I never have heard of any big successes. Has there been any big achievement of HPC other than rendering 3D movies quicker, breaking codes during wars, and helping governments spy on their own people?

  2. Re:I've Had It With Slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    but, where are ya gonna go?