China a competitive edge to U.S. in supercomputer

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 15 November 2010, 19:12 IST
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Bangalore: The Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin has achieved a performance level of 2.57 petaflop. This puts it in the number one spot on the 36th edition of the TOP500's world's most powerful supercomputer list. As a result, the prior winner on the list—the Cray XT5 "Jaguar" system at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee—is now ranked in second place, with a score of 1.75 petaflop/s. Nie Hua, Vice President of Dawning, said, "The list shows our domestic market has gradually accepted our homemade brands of high performance computers. Also, our high performance computers now have a competitive edge over the internationally renowned brands." Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks in the realms including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, and molecular modeling. The computing speed of the Tianhe-1 has nearly doubled that of the Dawning 6000, according to the 2010 China Top 100 List of High Performance Computers. Tianhe-1, meaning Milky Way, is able to do 2,507 trillion operations per second, with 4,700 trillion at peak. Its computing speed is 1.425 times faster than the previous fastest supercomputer Jaguar in the U.S. Despite losing the top spot in terms of overall performance by a single machine, the United States remains the leading consumer of HPC (high-performance computing) systems with 275 of the 500 in the list, although that's down a bit from 282 back in June. Europe's share is down as well, from 144 to 124, while Asia's is now at 84, up from 57. As far as U.S. companies are concerned, IBM remains at the top, followed by Cray and HP, the report said. Over 81 percent of the TOP500 employ Intel processors, while 11 percent use AMD Opterons and eight percent use IBM Power processors.

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