Announcement - China wins title of world’s fastest computer
A Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.
In an article in the New York Times, the computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings of the world’s 500 fastest machines — Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee — said that China’s Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, located at an American national laboratory in Tennessee.
Dongarra measures speed using a standard test to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations.
Tianhe-1A, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, can perform mathematical operations about 29 million times faster than supercomputers built in the 1970s.
Modern supercomputers are built by combining thousands of small computer servers and using software to turn them into a single entity.
The article said: “The Chinese system follows that model by linking thousands upon thousands of chips made by the American companies Intel and Nvidia. But the secret sauce behind the system — and the technological achievement — is the interconnect, or networking technology, developed by Chinese researchers that shuttles data back and forth across the smaller computers at breakneck rates.”
Source: iSGTW newsletter - 24th November 2010
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