Sunday, March 13, 2011

Super Computer: China bckt to own high-end chips

The fastest supercomputer in the world is in China - and is powered by chips of American manufacturers. Chinese researchers are working longer hours to make their own high-speed processors. For so far, processors from Intel and nVidia are used. That should change by the end of the year.


By then China will have developed their own chips and renounce for future supercomputers on the import of high-tech goods, HPCwire reported, citing the state-owned newspaper People's Daily. The next supercomputer, called "Dawning 6000", to use at home developed Loongson chips. 10,000 of which will be necessary to come up with a performance of one petaflops.

The record-computer "Tianhe-1a" brings it to a power of 2.566. This means that per second 2.566 trillion (one quadrillion is a one with fifteen zeros) computing tasks can be calculated with floating point numbers. The real difficulty in building such a supercomputer is to let the many chips of the machine to work quickly and smoothly.

China could catch up here and already has its own technology. But according to HPCwire, there is a serious problem: The required software is missing, the processing power and exploit. So from the "Dawning 6000" system could at best ten percent of the service is available. There is no simple for programmers with appropriate expertise in parallel computing.

Up to China on the global competition for Intel CPUs and AMD in the mass market, according to HPCwire but still take up to 20 years. Alone ten years were needed to meet the needs of the domestic market, is quoted a delegate of the National Congress. In the top ten fastest computer is a supercomputer, which stands in Germany: a research center in Jülich, potters, an IBM supercomputer with PowerPC processors, it brings with its 294 912 825 500 gigaflops of nuclei.

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