China joins supercomputer elite

[pampango]

Source: BBC

China has become one of a handful of nations to own one of the top five supercomputers in the world.

Its Tianhe-1 computer, housed at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin was ranked fifth on the biannual Top 500 supercomputer list. It is used for petroleum exploration and engineering tasks such as simulating aircraft designs.

The Top 500 list is dominated by machines in the US, which is home to 277 of ranked systems. It has eight of the top 10 machines.

Europe has 153 systems on the list, including the world's fourth most powerful machine. The IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany is the fastest machine outside the US and is able to run at more than 800 teraflops. The UK has the largest number of European machines on the list, with 44 systems.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8362825.stm

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The full list is at http://www.top500.org/list/2009/11/100 .

At least we're still "number 1" and number 2 and number 3 :) . Germany and China came in with numbers 4 and5. The US filled the 6-11 spots, then Russia had the #12 slot, Germany again at #13, surprisingly (to me) South Korea at #14, and Saudi Arabia at #18 in the top 20. Switzerland, Canada, India, and France had super computers in the next 10.

Interesting that we have the top 3 supercomputers, 9 of the top 11, and more than half of those in the world.

[Tesha]

1. It takes a lot of computer horsepower to do full simulations of nuclear weapons detonations. :-(

That's what a lot of our supercomputers are working on.

Tesha