Friday, June 21, 2013

What China's supercomputing push means for the U.S.

Via ComputerWorld:
China's latest supercomputer, which may be officially cited as the world's fasted when Top 500 global rankings are released mid-month, is running Chinese- made interconnects and software. China-made CPUs are up next, Beckman said.

Tianhe-2 or Milkyway-2, which will have 3.1 million cores, has a theoretical speed of almost 55 petaflops. It's been tested so far at nearly 31 petaflops. A petaflop is 1,000 teraflops, or one quadrillion floating-point operations per second. An exascale system is 1,000 petaflops.

Beckman, in an interview, explains the significance of China's moves, and the power problem facing the push to exascale.