China Takes Over Fastest Supercomputer Slot...For Now

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A dark day for supercomputer buffs has arrived today as the crown is passed from the United States to China. The American titan, the Cray XT-5 Jaguar, is no longer the world’s fastest supercomputer. No, it’s been outclassed by China’s Tianhe-1A, though both should sleep with one eye open.

The landscape for the top supercomputer race now looks like this: China’s Tianhe-1A out at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin managed to hit 2.57 petaflops per second (where petaflop measures quadrillions of calculations), and the new number two is the U.S. Department of Energy’s own slugger the Cray XT5 Jaguar at 1.75. The rest of the top five are comprised of Nebulae in China’s Shenzhen district at 1.27, the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s own Tsubame 2.0 at 1.19, and Hopper from the National Research Energy Scientific Computing Center in California rounds out the top five at 1.05.

It had been rumored a few months prior that Jaguar would get dethroned by the Chinese upstart, and that day has indeed arrived. It’s actually kind of surprising though, to see the lag between one and two–there’s almost a whole petaflop in there. Though for those who don’t much like the thought of Chinese supercomputing supremacy, fear not–word is still out there that the Japanese are working on a 10 petaflop system by 2012, and DARPA is still eyeing exaflop computing.

Of course, exaflop computing will be to petaflop supercomputers about what petaflop computing is to teraflop, and for the math wonks out there, please bear in mind I said “about”. So enjoy your crown while you’ve got it, China, because everyone else is looking to make a move on it.

Almost sounds like a big horse race, doesn’t it? Thus there will always be exciting news in the supercomputer races, as countries vie for processing supremacy with their various hardware representatives.