China Steals Supercomputer Title From The Us

[Infiltrator]

By Emil Protalinski, TechSpot.com

Published: October 28, 2010, 12:55 PM EST

China has built the world's fastest supercomputer, stealing the crown from the United States, according to the New York Times. The National University of Defense Technology's Tianhe-1A PC has 14,336 processors from Intel and over 7,168 M2050 graphics cards from Nvidia ($2,500 each). This gives it a horsepower equivalent of 175,000 laptop computers, according to Nvidia.

China says the Tianhe-1A, which is under supervision from the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Education, will be used by scientists across several fields and will also be made available to other countries.

The supercomputer race is extremely competitive and is a source of national pride. China's 2.507 petaflop supercomputer, which is 30 percent faster than the world's second most powerful supercomputer, was built by the National University of Defense Technology using the government's money and is now located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.

America's fastest supercomputer is in Tennessee, where it's been since 2004 when the US grabbed first place back from Japan. The ranking is based on a standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations. Out of the top 10, seven of the world's most powerful computers are in the US, two are in China, and one is in Germany.

Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/40899-china-s...rom-the-us.html

[Infiltrator]

Thanks to Nvidia Cuda anyone can build and own a supercomputer at home.

x1 Nvidia GTX480 Graphics card, contains up to 480 CUDA Cores

Buy x10 of those and you get a total of 4800 Cuda Cores.

Now you have a supercomputer, for cracking passwords, wireless keys and so on.

Edit: http://www.evga.com/products/moreInfo.asp?...0Family&sw=

Edited October 29, 2010 by Infiltrator

[barry99705]

Technically any computer that does 1gigaflop or more is considered a supercomputer. Most desktops have been able to do that for the last 8 years or so.

[Infiltrator]

Technically any computer that does 1gigaflop or more is considered a supercomputer. Most desktops have been able to do that for the last 8 years or so.

I agree with you, but it would take a lot of hardware to build a really super faster computer, that's where NVIDIA Cuda graphics cards comes in reducing the costs of hardware and possibly the power bill.

[digip]

[Infiltrator]

That's really amazing stuff, I am so jealous right now.

I am thinking in building one myself, not as powerful as Fastra II but will be powerful enough.

Thanks Digip.

[Guest Deleted_Account]

Well isn't this based on us knowing exactly what the US has? I mean if the US happened to have a 4 petaflop super computer would they really tell the world or wait until they had something better? lol Although I just read an article (pc mag I believe) about how the U.S Military is closing in on Exa-Flop processor (Which still barely puts a dent in AES-256 bit ).

[barry99705]

I like this one better, and Martin is a pretty cool guy.

http://vimeo.com/16204254

[Infiltrator]

With these graphics card nowadays providing so much computational power, eventually they will be out performing much of the supercomputers in existence today.