China Makes New Supercomputer: Ranked Fastest

[Rosarium]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101114/wl_asia_afp/chinatechnologyitworld

The People's Republic of China's Tianhe-1 has the fastest supercomputer according to the benchmarks used to rank them. The article says it means "Milky Way", but it doesn't. Even in Pinyin, I could tell it means "Sky" something (it means "Sky River" after further research...it is futile usually to look up words in Pinyin only because Chinese has many homophones..."he" could also mean "and" and at least 20 other common words...Chinese is very context sensitive even when characters are used).

I noticed the People's Republic of China gets a lot of attention here, especially as a nation to surpass the USA in various things. It is notable that the supercomputer uses mostly American designed parts and runs Linux.

Linux runs on the smallest computers and on the largest.

[CollegeCatholic]

Are supercomputers still used, or has parallel computing taken hold/popularity?

[icecream]

collegecatholic ask high level question. i too am intwerested in answer!

[paragon]

How many gigawhatsits is it ?

[CollegeCatholic]

How many gigawhatsits is it ?

Tianhe-1A - NUDT YH Cluster, X5670 2.93Ghz 6C, NVIDIA GPU, FT-1000 8C
2,566,000 Gigaflops.  (Peak at 4,701,000  Gflops)

#2 in the world:
1,759,000 Gigaflops (peak at: 2,331,000 Gflops)
Jaguar - Cray XT5-HE Opteron 6-core 2.6 GHz

[Rosarium]

How many gigawhatsits is it ?

Supercomputers are most often compared with Floating point Operations per Second (FLOPS), which is a type of calculation (involving numerical calculation) per second.

The number is beyond giga. It is 2.507 petaFLOPS if that means anything to you.

petaFLOPS   10^15
teraFLOPS   10^12
gigaFLOPS   10^9
megaFLOPS   10^6
kiloFLOPS   10^3

Folding@Home gets about 6.2 petaFLOPS now.

This metric is only useful for certain uses.

Measuring computer speed really depends on the use of it. For example, desktop computer CPUs can get into the gigaFLOPS, but even the fastest desktop CPU now is surpassed by GPUs (graphics processing unit) because it is more useful for that aspect.

These numbers are not really chased for the sake of it, but for scientific purposes. They also reflect natural developments in hardware.

[paragon]

My brain just blew up. 

[Rosarium]

Are supercomputers still used, or has parallel computing taken hold/popularity?

It depends on the problem that is being solved. Supercomputers are necessary when communication between processes is needed.

The total theoretical processing power is not always useful. Google's servers could have a total power upwards of 100 petaFLOPs, but it is hardly useful for the purposes of the Tianhe.

[Rosarium]

I thought this thread was going to discuss Chinese advancements in the world rather than supercomputers.

That is cool too. I was interested in the tech primarily.

[devotedknuckles]

What's the difference between a gpu and a CPU?
Twisted  thing just capped tself lol
creepy