China´s Tianhe is the fastest supercomputer in the world by Zuzana Zelenakova

China is the country of growth. It grows not only economically, but also technologically. In recent past, the government has begun to put greater emphasis on progress in the field of science and technology. Tiahne-1A, presented for the first time at a national conference on high-performance computers in China, is a fruit of that effort. Tiahne, menaing Milky way, is currently the world´s fastest supercomputer. Until recently, this post had been occupied by the Cray XT5 Jaguar developes by the US. The Tianhe supercomputer, designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), is housed at National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. Its construction is a resul! t of combined effort of 200 scientists that worked on the project for two years. Tiahne that can achieve a computing speed of 2,570 trillion calculations per second cost about $88 million. The fastest supercomputer in the world is no minkin, it has about 155 ton and stretches over the area of about 1,000 square meters. It is powered by 7,168 Nvidia tesla M2050 graphics procesor units (GPUs) and 14,336 Intel Xeon central processing units (CPUs). "The performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible without GPUs," said Guangming Liu, chief of National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. "The scientific research that is now possible with a system of this scale is almost without limits; we could not be more pleased with the results." "GPUs are redefining high performance computing," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia. "With the Tianhe-1A, GPUs now power two of the top three fastest computers in the world today. These GPU supercomputers are essential to! ols for scientists looking to turbocharge their rate of discov! ery." As far as the list of the world´s most powerful supercomputers is concerned, the US has seven of them, China has two and Germany one.

related story (sgx18600): http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101114/ts_afp/chinatechnologyi...

by Zuzana Zelenakova for Cantell TV (http://cantell.tv)

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