The fastest computer in the world will be in China (briefly)

David Heath
Sunday, 01 August 2010 23:31

IT Industry - Development

Currently ranked second in the Top500 Supercomputers, China's Nebulae is about to receive a reappraisal and is expected to be crowned number one in November's list.  But Nebulae's pre-eminence will be short-lived.  Current number one Jaguar is about to undergo an upgrade and there is a new super-supercomputer in the wings, with performance nearly ten times that of Jaguar and Nebulae.

iTWire recently looked at the May 2010 listing of the world's top supercomputers and found, for the second time, that Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer ruled the roost with a measured sustained performance of 1.79 1.76 PFlop/s (Peta - 10^15 -  floating point operations per second).

Jaguar was measured at a peak of 2.33 PFlop/s, but there is a competitor.  The Nebulae supercomputer, based in Shenzen, China.  Although producing a theoretical peak performance of 2.98 PFlop/s, the system was originally benchmarked at 1.27 PFlop/s, making it the third computer to exceed the 1 PFlop/s barrier (exceeding the Roadrunner system at Los Alamos, USA).

Testing currently underway is expected to confirm that Nebulae is able to achieve sustained performance much closer to the theoretical peak and this data is expected to be included in the November 2010 Top500 listing.

Reports from Chattanooga, Tennessee suggest that an upgrade program will see a considerable improvement in performance over the next 5 years.  Interestingly, should nothing change, in five years time Jaguar would be expected to be in the lower half of the list.

In the title, we mentioned that China's reign will be brief.  Read on for the reason.