China Speeds up the Markets of Super Computers

The race to tap their authority in market of technology, gave Chinese technicians a moment of pride when they launched the Fastest Supercomputer, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.

The computer, known as Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, which is at a national laboratory in Tennessee, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings.

The United States has always retained various spots in the top rankings of the Top500 and until now had maintained a #1 spot for the past two years with the Jaguar - Cray XT5-HE Opteron Six Core 2.6 GHz which is housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We are all used to personal computers with dual cores or even quad cores, but the Jaguar system boasts 224,256 x86-based AMD cores -- That should give you an idea of its core speed. But such is the power of computer introduced by China that Jaguar is now in a cloud of dust.

The $88 Million, Tianhe-1A (meaning Milky Way) computer uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs, 14,336 Intel Zeon CPUs stacked into 103 different cabinets weighs over 150 tons & consumes just over 4 total megawatts of power. All those numbers working together means that it is 1.4 times faster than Jaguar. The new Chinese Supercomputer is capable of a sustained computing environment of 2.507 petaflops.
To give you an idea on how fast the Tianhe-1A actually is, here's a statement from the actual press release from Xinhua News which was posted on the National University of Defense Technology; the organization who developed the record-breaking machine -- "A single-day task for Tianhe might take a mainstream dual-core personal computer 160 years to complete, working non-stop -- if it can last that long." The computer is already starting to churn data for the Chinese weather service and the National Offshore Oil Corporation but I have a feeling that it will be working non-stop with a line of researchers wanting to take advantage of its amazing speeds.
The Chinese might have a smile on their faces, but the way this battle of technology is fought, it will not be a surprise that is coming few days we hear another launch of speed star by US, or may be someone else??