China Made World’s Fastest Supercomputer !!!

October 29, 2010 by Nataly in Technology

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China may have the world’s fastest supercomputer. Tianhe-1A, which is translated from Chinese for “River in the Sky” or “Milky Way”, is capable of sustained computing of 2.507 petaflops – equivalent to 2,507 trillion calculations – each second.

The US scientist who maintains the international rankings said he believed Tianhe-1A was 1.4 times faster than the former number one, the Cray XT5 Jaguar in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Tianhe-1A was created by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China. It uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs. The system weighs 155 tons and has 103 cabinets that cover 1,000 square meters.The system consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity.

The supercomputer, which comprises 103 computer racks that cover 17,000 square feet, was created by 200 computer scientists over two years and it costs $88 million. NUDT said it will be used “to process seismic data for oil exploration, conduct biomedical computing, and to help design aerospace vehicles.”

A computing expert at the University of Tennessee, Jack Dongarra said: “Certainly there’s some nationalistic pride in having the fastest computer, but it’s also a signal that the U.S. is not the dominant force when it comes to supercomputing.”