A Chinese supercomputer has recorded the world's fastest processing speed, apparently overtaking its US rival, reports said on Thursday. The Tianhe-1A supercomputer achieved a sustained processing speed of 2.51 petaflops, or 2.51 quadrillion calculations, per second, according to the 2010 China High-Performance Computer Top 100 List.
The supercomputer had ranked seventh in a global list issued in June that was topped by the 1.76-petaflops of the Jaguar system, run by the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The Tianhe-1A system would rank top of the global list if the performance of other supercomputers remained unchanged, the US-based NVIDIA Corporation, which supplied more than 7,000 graphics-processing units (GPUs) for the Chinese supercomputer, said in a statement.
The computer is housed at China's National Supercomputer Centre at the National Defence University in the northern city of Tianjin. "The performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible without GPUs," NVIDIA's statement quoted Liu Guangming, the head of the centre, as saying.
"The scientific research that is now possible with a system of this scale is almost without limits," Liu said. "We could not be more pleased with the results."
The supercomputer had already begun trial use for clients, including the Tianjin Meteorological Bureau and the National Offshore Oil Corp data centre, the Chinese government's Xinhua news agency reported. "It can also serve the animation industry and bio-medical research," the agency quoted Liu as saying. NVIDIA said Tianhe-1A would be operated as an "open-access system to use for large-scale scientific computations."