IT IS already close to overtaking the U.S. as the world’s economic superpower.
Now China has trumped the Americans in the fastest supercomputer stakes – by building a machine which is said to be 40 times faster than any other.
The Chinese supercomputer, called the Tianhe-1A, crunches numbers at warp speed – at a mind-boggling two thousand trillion calculations a second.
The £50 million machine took 200 engineers two years to build, and needs to be housed in 103 refridgerated cabinets.
It has a speed of 2.507 petaflops – 1.4 times as powerful as the current supercomputer, the Cray XT5 Jaguar at the U.S. Department of Energy, which has held the crown for the past year.
Professor Jack Dongarra, who compiles the rankings of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers, said the Chinese computer ‘blows away the existing No 1 machine’.
Mr Dongarra’s list is not due to be completed until next week, but he predicts that no other machine will come close to matching the Tianhe.
‘It’s definitely a game changer,’ said Mark Seager, chief technology officer for computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S.
The Tianhe-1A, whose name means Milky Way in mandarin, has 14,000 times the processing power of a normal machine.
It also contains 7,000 graphics processors – the type used in video games – to further boost its power.
But despite its incredible speed the Tianhe-1A is also greener than the current top supercomputer – with the difference in energy consumption enough to provide electricity to more than 5,000 homes for a year.
Now China has trumped the Americans in the fastest supercomputer stakes – by building a machine which is said to be 40 times faster than any other.
The Chinese supercomputer, called the Tianhe-1A, crunches numbers at warp speed – at a mind-boggling two thousand trillion calculations a second.
The £50 million machine took 200 engineers two years to build, and needs to be housed in 103 refridgerated cabinets.
It has a speed of 2.507 petaflops – 1.4 times as powerful as the current supercomputer, the Cray XT5 Jaguar at the U.S. Department of Energy, which has held the crown for the past year.
Professor Jack Dongarra, who compiles the rankings of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers, said the Chinese computer ‘blows away the existing No 1 machine’.
Mr Dongarra’s list is not due to be completed until next week, but he predicts that no other machine will come close to matching the Tianhe.
‘It’s definitely a game changer,’ said Mark Seager, chief technology officer for computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S.
The Tianhe-1A, whose name means Milky Way in mandarin, has 14,000 times the processing power of a normal machine.
It also contains 7,000 graphics processors – the type used in video games – to further boost its power.
But despite its incredible speed the Tianhe-1A is also greener than the current top supercomputer – with the difference in energy consumption enough to provide electricity to more than 5,000 homes for a year.
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