China lays claim to fastest supercomputer

A supercomputing cluster in China is officially the fastest in the world. The recently upgraded Tianhe-1A cluster has reported a top performance of 2.507 petaflops, more than 2.5 trillion calculations per second.

The figure trumps the record set by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Cray Jaguar cluster, which tops out at a speed of 1.5 petaflops.

The announcement of the 2.5 petaflop mark comes just two years after IBM's RoadRunner system broke the 1 petaflop barrier for the first time.

The Tianhe-1A system is located at China's National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, and was designed by the country's National University of Defense Technology.

Prior to the update, the Tianhe-1A cluster had ranked seventh on the Top500 supercomputing list.

The system uses a combination of 14,336 Intel Xeon processors and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla graphics processors.

Nvidia said that by integrating graphics chips into the cluster, a technique known as general processing over GPU, the system is able to cut energy consumption from 14 megawatts to just over four megawatts.

"The performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible without GPUs," said National Supercomputer Center chief Guangming Liu.

"The scientific research that is now possible with a system of this scale is almost without limits, and we could not be more pleased with the results."