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Chinese May Have Fastest Supercomputer, Nvidia Says (Update1)
By Bloomberg News
Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) -- China’s National University of Defense Technology may have designed the world’s fastest supercomputer with speeds 43 percent greater than previous systems, said Nvidia Corp., which supplied parts for the machine.
The university’s Tianhe-1A set a performance record of 2.507 petaflops, or more than 2 quadrillion calculations per second, Sumit Gupta, senior product manager for Nvidia, said on a conference call with reporters. That would make it faster than any system on the global Top 500 list of supercomputers published in June, Gupta said.
China is investing in supercomputers to improve research and simulation for climate modeling, genomics, alternative energy, seismic imaging and defense. Since China began investing in the technology in 2002, it has risen to third globally in overall high-performance computing power, trailing the U.S. and the European Union.
“They’ve basically recognized the fact that they need to invest in high-performance computing to continue to advance their technology, to continue to advance their research and science,” Gupta said. “This is recognition that the United States had about 50 years ago.”
175,000 Laptops
The Tianhe-1A uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 graphics processing units and 14,336 Intel Corp. chips. It uses power three times more efficiently than current supercomputers, according to Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California.
The system, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, has the computing power of 175,000 laptops, Nvidia said. A petaflop is a measure of a computer’s processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion, or quadrillion, operations per second. The speed of this machine is 2.5 petaflops.
“The scientific research that is now possible with a system of this scale is almost without limits,” Liu Guangming, president of the center in Tianjin, said in a statement supplied by Nvidia. “We could not be more pleased with the results.”
Officials at the supercomputing center in Tianjin and at the computer science department of the National University of Defense Technology didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Oak Ridge ‘Jaguar’
The new computer isn’t currently referenced on the websites of either organization.
China had two of the top 10 computers on the June list of the world’s fastest computers, compared with seven for the U.S. The list will be updated next month.
The fastest computer on the current list is Jaguar, built by Seattle-based Cray Inc. and installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Jaguar has clocked 1.75 petaflops in testing.
In June, China’s Nebulae, at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, took the No. 2 spot with a measured speed of 1.271 petaflops.
The U.S. has been replaced in the top spot for the fastest computer before, only to reclaim the position. In 2002, Japan claimed the No. 1 position with the Earth Simulator, Jack Dongarra, director of the innovative computing laboratory at the University of Tennessee, said last month.
He has overseen the semiannual Top 500 list since it first appeared in 1993.
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