Posted on 06/01/2010 10:32:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked as the world’s second-fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology.
The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops — the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second — in the latest semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest 500 computers.
The newest ranking was made public on Monday at the International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Supercomputers are used for scientific and engineering problems as diverse as climate simulation and automotive design.
The Chinese machine is actually now ranked as the world’s fastest in terms of theoretical peak performance, but that is considered a less significant measure than the actual computing speed achieved on a standardized computing test.
The world’s fastest computer remains the Cray Jaguar supercomputer, based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Last November it was measured at 1.75 petaflops.
In the previous year’s ranking, the Chinese had the fifth-fastest computer, a system that was based at a National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China. That machine has now dropped to seventh place.
The United States continues to be the dominant maker of supercomputers, and is the nation with the most machines in the top 500. The United States has 282 of the world’s fastest 500 computers on the new list, an increase from 277 when the rankings were compiled in November.
But China appears intent on challenging American dominance. There had been some expectation that China would make an effort to complete a system based on Chinese-designed components in time for the June ranking. The Nebulae is based on chips from Intel and Nvidia.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
dang.. the Chinese designing such a fast chip? incredible!
Bill Gates & Microcrap working on ways to slow it down as we speak.
Instead we have much more money and research pouring into web-server, networking, and database infrastructure which is generally composed of a workload spread across many lesser systems .
Yeah, but can they drive it???
Do you really think they designed it? I bet if you looked closely you would see a bunch of patents which were violated (both software and hardware). I am not a computer guy, but I have experience with how they handle IP in the mobile equipment industry.
But, after an hour, you want to run the data again...
guess it’s not running windows...
R&D follows manufacturing. Who knew?
We are reaping the rewards of our own stupidity as a nation.
It’s going to get much worse.
Yup, it can pick one item from Column A, two from Column B and six from Column C in just a few seconds.
Simply amazing!
Wait! No MSG!
oh I agree. I’m 100% sure they broke a couple of patents to get there.
one thousand trillion
one million billion
one billion million
one trillion thousand
one quadrillion
Wonder why the writer chose that phrase?
We keep ridiculing cheap and throw-away Chinese goods.
We forget that when it comes to matters of national security, the Chinese do not compromise on quality, reliability and safety.
We ignore them and their national will to challenge us at our peril.
/johnny
“But, after an hour, you want to run the data again...”
Lol at that.
I can’t type on this laptop... Sorry for the errors.
Do you really think they designed it?
Probably based on Loongson, which executes the MIPS ISA.
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