China tops US in world’s fastest supercomputer race

Rumor has been made fact, with the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin hitting a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second), making it the top supercomputer in the world while wresting this coveted spot away from its arch-nemesis, the US. The dethroned champion is the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system that belongs to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee, where said machine is now occupying second place, with a score of 1.75 petaflop/s – that’s a pretty significant lag. This came as no surprise as Jaguar was already tipped to lose its position since news in late October pointed out that the Tianhe-1A was already considerably faster even in testing. As for the3rd, 4th and 5th spots, those are occupied by Nebulae, a Chinese system in Shenzhen rated at 1.27 petaflop/s; Tsubame 2.0, a system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology that scores 1.19 petaflop/s; and Hopper, a Cray XE6 system at DOE’s National Research Energy Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center in California, which hits 1.05 petaflop/s.