The Tianjin National Supercomputer Center's Tianhe-1A system ripped 2.67 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), beating out the former leader, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Cray XT5 Jaguar system, benchmarked at 1.75 petaflops.
U.S.-built systems had topped the list for the last six years, after an IBM BlueGene/L system overtook the spot from Japan's NEC Earth Simulator system.
The U.S. has 275 systems in the Top 500, beating out China which is in second at 42.
"Governments around the world are recognizing the deployment of this technology is a prerequisite to sustaining economic competitiveness," says Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing for IBM (via CW). "It lets you do better product designs, basic research, life sciences, fundamental research in materials."
The DOE has already said earlier this year that it is building an IBM Sequoia system for 2012 that should hit 20 petaflops.
Intel processors are in 406 of the top systems, followed by AMD at 57.
Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 14 Nov 2010 15:13
