Posted by The Blogging Desk on Fri, Apr 29, 2011
- by Andrew, "My Goatee Does Not Make Me The Evil Version Of Myself", Levin
Check out this behemoth.
It's currently the world’s fastest super-computer according to top500.org, a site which publishes a list of the fastest and most powerful machines every six months or so. The Tianhe-1A is owned by China who has just recently surpassed the US as having the fastest super-computer. Although all of its ~14,000 Intel processors with 186,368 cores came from the United States, it’s inter-connect was designed and built by the Chinese. The inter-connect is a core component that allows all the processors to connect to one another.
Back in 2002 the Japanese developed a super-computer which surpassed the US who held the number one ranking at the time. Shortly after the announcement though, the US receiving funding from various organizations and was able to reclaim the number one spot with the Cray XT5-HE. So we will see what happens now with China standing tall on the forefront.
So what is the need for such large scale and powerful machines? Scientific purposes is the obvious answer that comes to mind, which is indeed pretty much the main use. There are various applications of this however, such as quantum mechanics, military research, weather modeling, atomic calculations, etc. I want one.
