James Delahunty
30 Oct 2010 21:09
China claims to have built the world's faster supercomputer, surpassing the Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer in the United States.
The Tianhe-1A was unveiled on Thursday and claims a performance record of 2.507 petaflops (flops == floating point operations per second; petaflops == 1015), beating the Cray XT5 Jaguar's 1.75 petaflops record. The Chinese system will have to wait to be crowned the world's fastest supercomputer until the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany in a couple of weeks, which will compile a list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.
It is powered by 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs. The system still requires U.S.-made processors, but the very high-speed interconnect technology and software that runs the system was developed in China. It was designed at the National University of Defense Technology in China and comprises 103 computer racks, consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity and covers 17,000 square feet.
"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," said Jack Dongarra, a computing expert at the University of Tennessee.
Dongarra recalled Japan's holding of the crown for supercomputer speed in 2002, which he said spurred the United States on to regain the record. While he hopes the same thing happens again, he said the United States needs to invest in the development of the software, algorithms, models and other technologies instead of just splashing out on shiny new hardware when it is produced by chipmakers.
Supercomputers are used when phenomenal amounts of computational power is required. They are important for scientific research, biomedicine, weather analysis and other tasks.