China says it has built the world's fastest supercomputer, raising concerns in some quarters that China will eventually challenge the United States as the dominant force in this arena. Unveiled last week, the Tianhe-1A clocked 2,507 petaflops in a standard benchmark test, easily surpassing current record holder Cray XT5 Jaguar's 1.75 petaflops.  A petaflop is defined as a 1,000 trillion sustained floating-point operations per second. (A top-of-the-line Intel i7 CPU can perform about 70 gigaflops today; a million gigaflops gives you one petaflop.)

The 4.04 megawatts Tianhe-1A spans across 103 computer racks, and is powered by 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 Graphic Processing Units and 14,336 Intel Xeon processors. Vital interconnect technology for moving data through the system and the software powering the supercomputer though, were developed in China. A third processor, the indigenously produced eight-core FeiTeng-1000 is used to operate service nodes such as those related to log-ins.

Underscoring concerns over China's ability to threaten the current balance of the supercomputing is the belief that China could build a supercomputer based on an indigenous processor in as little as 12 to 18 months. According to Computerworld, this is a view shared by Steven Koonin, the undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Unable to buy the most powerful supercomputers from the West in the past, Steve Conway, a high-performance computing analyst at IDC observed that China would be working in that direction since it would "presumably" want to escape from dependency on foreign nations for vital components such as the CPU and GPU processors.  In the meantime, the Top500 Supercomputer listing is scheduled to be released in the middle of November, which is expected to officially confirm the Tianhe-1A as the world's fastest supercomputer.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Computerworld
- check out this article at InformationWeek

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