China Zooms Past US With New Supercomputer

(Oct. 28) -- China has built what's believed to be the fastest computer in the world, outpacing the top American machine and boosting Beijing's role as a key technology player.

Named Tianhe-1A, which means "Milky Way" in Mandarin, China's new supercomputer has 168 graphics processing units -- the type of graphics chips used in video games -- and 14,336 Intel CPUs, according to PC World. All of these processors were made by U.S. companies, but they're linked together by new Chinese-invented technology.

The supercomputer can perform 2,507 trillion calculations, or 2.507 petaflops, per second, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported. But the machine's untested, theoretical speed is nearly two times that figure, it said. That's 1.4 times faster than the previous record holder, a supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The new Chinese computer "blows away the existing No. 1 machine," Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings, told The New York Times.

His official list of the world's fastest 500 computers won't be finalized until next week. "We don't close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster," he said.

The U.S. is still home to more than half of the world's top 500 supercomputers.

It took 200 Chinese engineers two years to build Tianhe, at a cost of more than $88 million, the International Business Times reported. It was designed by China's National University of Defense Technology, and its specs were announced at a conference today in Beijing, though the machine sits in 103 refrigerated cabinets in China's National Center for Supercomputing, in the northern port city of Tianjin.

So far it's been used in trial runs to process weather patterns for the city's meteorological bureau, and to crunch numbers for the China National Offshore Oil Corp. "It can also serve the animation industry and biomedical research," the supercomputing lab's director, Liu Guangming, told Xinhua.

Experts say China's new supercomputer serves as a wake-up call to the West, showing how China threatens to take the lead in national investment in technology.

"It's definitely a game changer in the high-performance market," Mark Seager, chief technology officer for computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told The Wall Street Journal. "This is a phase transition, representative of the shift of economic competitiveness from the West to the East."

Another supercomputing expert at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Wu-chun Feng, told the Times that "the U.S. dominance in high-performance computing is at risk."

"One could argue that this hits the foundation of our economic future," he said.

This isn't the first time American industry has had its digital throne stolen by an Asian country. In 2002, Japan manufactured a computer more powerful than the top 20 U.S. machines put together, Agence France-Presse reported. Japan is also developing another machine, dubbed "K Computer," in a bid to one-up China, the news agency said.