October 29, 2010

China overtakes the US with its supercomputer

The tests performed and reported every 6 months to make it to the top 500 super computers list (http://www.top500.org/) have now confirmed that China is going to be at the top position for the list coming out in a few weeks, leaving behind the current most powerful supercomputer Jaguar by a good margin. The supercomputer named Tianhe-1A is clocking nearly 2.4 Petaflops.

It appears to be an improvement from the same machine which ranks 7 in the earlier rakings in June 2010. They seem to have developed a new interconnect which is reported to perform twice as fast as the common infinband interconnects used in most supercomputers. Also I am not sure about this, but the NYTimes report above mentions the supercomputer using NVIDIA chips, while the June 2010 mentions the use of ATI(AMD) GPUs.