China Lays Out Plans for 100 Petaflop Super by 2015

Over at InfoWorld, Michael Kan writes that, as the U.S. launched what’s expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops, China is building a machine that is intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), according to the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center, where the machine will be housed. Tianhe-2 could help keep China competitive with the future supercomputers of other countries, as industry experts estimate machines will start reaching 1,000-petaflop performance by 2018. The Tianhe-2 is not China’s first attempt at building a world-beating supercomputer. It briefly took the top spot on the world’s list of most powerful supercomputers in 2010 with the Tianhe-1A. That computer is now ranked fifth in the world with a theoretical peak speed of 4.7 petaflops, and uses processors from Intel and Nvidia.

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