China unveils its fastest supercomputer.Byline: ANI New Delhi New Delhi (dĕl`ē), city (1991 pop. 294,149), capital of India and of Delhi state, N central India, on the right bank of the Yamuna River. , October 30 (ANI): China has unveiled its fastest supercomputer, which at its peak speed can do more than one quadrillion One thousand times one trillion, which is 1, followed by 15 zeros, or 10 to the 15th power. See space/time. calculations per second, known as a petaflop. The birth of the supercomputer, named "Tianhe", which means "Milky Way Milky Way, the galaxy of which the sun and solar system are a part, seen as a broad band of light arching across the night sky from horizon to horizon; if not blocked by the horizon, it would be seen as a circle around the entire sky. ", makes China the second country, after the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. , to build a petaflop computer. This gigantic device can do as many calculations in one day as those done by an ordinary dual-core personal computer in 160 years, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Li Nan, director of the Tianhe Project Office under the National University of Defense Technology, developer of the supercomputer. Tianhe, at a cost of 600 million yuan, ranks first on China's Top 100 supercomputer list released in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province, with a theoretical peak performance of 1.206 petaflops and a Linpack performance of 560 teraflops. The Linpack benchmark is used to measure the supercomputer's real performance in practical use. The data has been submitted to the world Top 500 organization, which will release the new ranking list in November. According to the Top 500 list in June, Tianhe can be ranked the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world. "Supported by the national high-tech research and development program, also known as the 863 program, development of Tianhe has involved more than 200 computer experts who spent about two years in designing and producing the petaflop supercomputer," said Zhang Yulin, president of the defense university. The supercomputer has many practical applications, and will be used in seismic data processing data processing or information processing, operations (e.g., handling, merging, sorting, and computing) performed upon data in accordance with strictly defined procedures, such as recording and summarizing the financial transactions of a for oil exploration, bio-medical research, development of aerospace vehicles, long-term weather and climate forecasting, financial data analysis and pollution control in the Bohai Sea area, according to Li. Tianhe, made up of 103 refrigerator-sized silver gray cabinets, occupies an area of nearly 1,000 sq m and weighs 155 tons, containing 6,144 Intel CPUs and 5,120 AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, www.amd.com) A major manufacturer of semiconductor devices including x86-compatible CPUs, embedded processors, flash memories, programmable logic devices and networking chips. GPUs, with a storage capacity of 1 PB. "Tianhe can store four times of all the books housed in the National Library of China. If every one of China's 1.3 billion people takes a high-resolution digital photo, Tianhe can record all the photos," said Li Nan. The giant machine, now housed in Changsha, will be installed in the National Supercomputing Center in north China's port city Tianjin at the end of this year. It will be made available for domestic and overseas users in 2010. (ANI) Copyright 2009 Asian News International The Asian News International (ANI) agency provides multimedia news to China and 50 bureaus in India. It covers virtually all of South Asia since its foundation and presently claims, on its official website, to be the leading South Asia-wide news agency. (ANI) - All Rights Reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |
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