Chinese supercomputer now the world's fastest

[Eldritch]

Chinese Supercomputer Said to Break U.S. Speed Record

A newly built supercomputer in China appears poised to take the world performance lead, another sign of the country's growing technological prowess that is likely to set off alarms about U.S. competitiveness and national security.

The system was designed by China's National University of Defense Technology and is housed at the National Supercomputing Center in the city of Tianjin. It is part of a new breed that exploits graphics chips more commonly used in playing videogames—supplied by Nvidia Corp.—as well as standard microprocessors from Intel Corp.

Supercomputers are massive machines that help tackle the toughest scientific problems, including simulating commercial products like new drugs as well as defense-related applications such as weapons design and breaking codes. The field has long been led by U.S. technology companies and national laboratories, which operate systems that have consistently topped lists of the fastest machines in the world.

But Nvidia says the new system in Tianjin—which is being formally announced Thursday—was able to reach 2.5 petaflops. That is a measure of calculating speed ordinarily translated into a thousand trillion operations per second. It is more than 40% higher than the mark set last June by a system called Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that stood at No. 1 on a twice-yearly ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputers.

"I don't know of another system that is going to be anywhere near the performance and the power of this machine" in China, said Jack Dongarra, a supercomputer expert on the Oak Ridge research staff who is a professor at the University of Tennessee and recently inspected the system in Tianjin last week. "It is quite impressive."

The development was not altogether unexpected. China placed 24 systems in the so-called Top 500 supercomputer ranking last June; a system called Nebulae, for example, took second place that also used chips from Nvidia and Intel.

But Mr. Dongarra and other researchers said the machine should nevertheless serve as a wake-up call that China is threatening to take the lead in scientific computing—akin to a machine from Japan that took the No. 1 position early in the past decade and triggered increased U.S. investment in the field.

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[mvbeleg]

China boasts world's fastest supercomputer

BEIJING (AFP) – China is set to trump the US to take the number one spot for the fastest supercomputer ever made in a survey of the world's zippiest machines, it was reported Thursday.

Tianhe-1, meaning Milky Way, has a sustained computing speed of 2,507 trillion calculations per second, making it the fastest computer in China on a list published Thursday.

But it is also 1.4 times faster that the world's current fastest ranked supercomputer in the US, housed at a national laboratory in Tennessee, according to the New York Times.

Tianhe-1 does its warp-speed "thinking" at the National Center for Supercomputing in the northern port city of Tianjin -- using mostly chips designed by US companies.

The Tianjin Meteorological Bureau and the National Offshore Oil Corporation data centre have both started trials using the computer.

"It can also serve the animation industry and bio-medical research," Liu Guangming, the supercomputing centre's director, told state news agency Xinhua.

According to Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings which are due to be released next week, the Chinese beast "blows away the existing number one machine".

"We don't close the books until November 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster," he told the New York Times.

It is not the first time, however, that the US has had its digital crown stolen by an Asian upstart. In 2002, Japan made a machine with more power than the top 20 American computers put together.

Japan is also working on a new machine called "K Computer" in a bid to take the supercomputing crown.

Computer designer Steven J. Wallach is not overly worried by China's rise to computing superpower.

"It's interesting, but it's like getting to the four-minute mile," he told the New York Times. "The world didn't stop. This is just a snapshot in time.

"They want to show they are number one in the world, no matter what it is."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101028...hnologyitworld