Imaginechina / AFPTianhe-2: almost twice as fast as the United States’ TitanImaginechina / AFP
China has regained the lead in the ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The latest edition of the biannual Top500 ranking reports that the Chinese Tianhe-2 supercomputer, built by National Defense Technology University, achieved a speed of 33.86 petaflops, or 33.86 quadrillion operations per second. Its performance is almost twice as fast as the 17.59 petaflops of the American supercomputer Titan, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This is the second time that China has topped the ranking, compiled since 1993 by a group of researchers from the United States and Germany. In 2010, Tianhe-1 was in the lead for six months, until Japan’s K supercomputer surpassed it. The United States continues to dominate the ranking, with 252 of the 500 most powerful computers. But China has established itself in second place with 66 of them. Japan, with 30, Britain, with 29, France, with 23 and Germany, with 19 complete the list of the top six countries with the most supercomputers in the ranking. Brazil has three on the list. Grifo04 and Grifo02, owned by Petrobras, are listed in 122nd and 219th place, respectively. Tupã, at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), purchased in 2010 with funds from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and from FAPESP, is in the 145th position.
Republish