Chinese supercomputer named as world's fastest

A Chinese university has built the world's fastest
supercomputer, almost doubling the speed of the U.S. machine
that previously claimed the top spot and underlining China's rise
as a science and technology powerhouse.
The semiannual TOP500 listing of the world's fastest
supercomputers released Monday says the Tianhe-2 developed by
the National University of Defense Technology in central China's
Changsha city is capable of sustained computing of 33.86
petaflops per second. That's the equivalent of 33,860 trillion
calculations per second.
The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the U.S. Energy
Department's Titan machine off the No. 1 spot. It achieved 17.59
petaflops per second.
Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modeling
weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions and designing
jetliners.
It's the second time a Chinese computer has been named the
world's fastest. In November 2010, the Tianhe-2's predecessor,
Tianhe-1A, had that honor before Japan's K computer overtook it a
few months later on the TOP500 list, a ranking curated by three
computer scientists at universities in the U.S. and Germany.
The Tianhe-2 shows how China is leveraging rapid economic
growth and sharp increases in research spending to join the
United States, Europe and Japan in the global technology elite.
"Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and
they are only using Intel for the main compute part," TOP500
editor Jack Dongarra, who toured the Tianhe-2 facility in May, said
in a news release. "That is, the interconnect, operating system,
front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese."