China strengthens supercomputing power

China runs two of the world's top 10 supercomputers

China now owns the world's second most powerful supercomputer, according to the June Top 500 supercomputer list.

The Nebulae supercomputer is at the National Super Computer Center in Shenzhen, and runs on a Dawning TC3600 blade system with Intel X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPUs.

Nebulae has a faster peak performance than the US Cray Jaguar system, which tops the list in terms of Linpack performance.

The Linpack benchmark shows the number of billion floating point operations per second and is used as the standard for the Top 500 list.

The Jaguar system, which is owned by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a Linpack performance of 1.75 petaflops. One petaflop refers to one quadrillion calculations per second.

Jaguar is used mainly for climate research and nuclear weapons simulation.

The most powerful system in Europe on the Top 500 list is the IBM BlueGene/P system in Germany, which came fifth.

The fastest machine in the UK is HECToR and ranks number 26. It is housed at the University of Edinburgh and has been used to find out how dinosaurs moved.

The US continues to dominate the Top 500 ranking with 282 of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers. The Europeans have 144 supercomputers on the list, while Asia has 57 systems of which 24 are in China.

The UK remains the top supercomputer power in Europe with 38 systems.

The Top 500 ranking, which is issued twice annually, is scheduled for release today at the International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg, Germany.