China officially has fastest computer

The news that China might take top slot in the list of the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputers first broke at the end of last month but now it’s official.

The Tianhe-1A which is used for weather forecasting and surveying mines made it by a long shot with a performance of 2.57 petaflops. A Petaflop is a measure of a computer’s processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

Knocked into second place was the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee. It is capable of 1.75 petaflops.

China also takes third place with Nebulae which is located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen. It achieved 1.27 petaflops.

Fourth place is held by Japan with Tsubame 2.0 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology with a performance of 1.19 petaflops.

Then in fifth place there’s another US listing, Hopper, a Cray XE6 system at DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center in California with a performance of 1.05 petaflops.

Sixth place was taken by France with the Tera 100 Bull system at the French CEA (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives) which is basically the Atomic and Alternative Energies Commission.

Five of the top 10 are making it to the list for the first time and currently 5 of the top 10 supercomputers are from the US but only 2 of them are in the top 5. In the past the USA have usually dominated the top of the list.

So what does this mean for the US and are they in danger of losing the battle of the supercomputers?

“What is scary about this is that the US dominance in high-performance computing is at risk. One could argue that this hits the foundation of our economic future” Professor Wu-chun Feng, a supercomputing expert at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, told the NYT.

However, the US can take comfort from the fact that it still has the most computers on the top 500 list with 275 systems although that is down from 282 five months ago.

It’s not the first time that the US has been pushed off the top slot either; the Japanese did it in 2004. However, the US soon took it back. No doubt they’ll be hoping to do it again, perhaps with Blue Waters next year or Sequoia the year after.

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