By Star Chang, posted Jun 2, 2010 at 11:43 PM, 342 views,

Chinese Supercomputer is Ranked World’s Second-Fastest

A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked as the world’s second-fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology. The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops. That means it performs 1,270 trillion calculations a second. How long does it take an average PC to match its performance ? Answer: about 9hrs !

The world’s fastest computer remains the Cray Jaguar supercomputer, based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Last November it was measured at 1.75 petaflops. The United States continues to be the dominant maker of supercomputers, but China appears intent on challenging American dominance. There had been some expectations that China would make an effort to complete a system based on Chinese-designed components. At the meantime, the Nebulae is based on chips from Intel and Nvidia. We are just thinking that, this Nebulae thing, is it a knock-off from the Cray Jaguar supercomputer ?

Source: Ce.cn