China Builds World’s Fastest Supercomputer

China has built the world’s fastest supercomputer, which is almost twice as fast as the previous record holder from the US.

The Tianhe-2 has been developed by the National University of Defence Technology in central China’s Changsha city and is capable of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

The news that China’s computing capabilities have overtaken those of the US was revealed in the semiannual TOP500 listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers released on Monday.

It underlines the country’s rise as a science and technology powerhouse.

The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the US Energy Department’s Titan machine off the number one spot.

Scientists check a component on the Tianhe-2

Titan achieved 17.59 petaflops per second – equivalent to 17,590 trillion calculations a second.

By comparison, the human brain is believed to be capable of 10-20 petaflops per second – around half of that of Tianhe-2.

Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modelling 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 honour before Japan’s K computer overtook it a few months later in the TOP500 list, a ranking curated by three computer scientists at universities in the US and Germany.

The Tianhe-2 is an indication of how China is using rapid economic growth to pay for sharp increases in research spending, to allow it to join the United States, Europe and Japan in the global technology elite.

Several banks of components which make up Tianhe-2

TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra, who toured the Tianhe-2 facility in May, said in a news release: “Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part.

“That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese.”

China – the inventor of the abacus – has a proud history of inventing techniques for calculation and tabulation.

Experts say that although Tianhe-2 can perform more calculations per second than the brain, it is still not as powerful.

Human brains have far superior parallel processing, which allows them to operate multiple networks of neurons at the same time, whereas computers have to make calculations one at a time.