China wins a slowing supercomputer race

By Joab Jackson | IDG News Service Posted on June 23, 2014
 
China continues to dominate the high end of the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, even as the growth of the computing power on the list seems to be stagnating.
Tianhe-2, run by China's National University of Defense Technology, clocked 33.86 petaflops per second (quadrillions of calculations per second) for the 43rd edition of the Top500, released Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany.
The runner-up in this twice-yearly ranking came in at only half the speed: The U.S. Energy Department's Titan, a Cray XK7 machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, tested out at 17.59 Pflop/s.
Supercomputers perform tasks larger than any single server could handle, such as large-scale calculations for physics research, forecasting the weather, or modeling in high fidelity the design of complex machinery such as airplanesfo
 
InfoWorld/ full read here/http://www.infoworld.com/d/computer-hardware/china-wins-slowing-supercomputer-race-244801