Tianhe-2: Will China Be First to Develop a 100-Petaflop Supercomputer?

By Karla Robinson
November 9, 2012

China is looking to be a top supercomputer competitor with its Tianhe-2, which expects to run at 100 petaflops and be released in 2015.
The U.S. launched a 20-petaflop computer, the world’s fastest supercomputer. China’s latest machine looks to increase those speeds by five times.
“Tianhe-2 could help keep China competitive with the future supercomputers of other countries, as industry experts estimate machines will start reaching 1,000-petaflop performance by 2018,” notes ITworld.
“The Tianhe-2 is not China’s first attempt at building a world-beating supercomputer. It briefly took the top spot on the world’s list of most powerful supercomputers in 2010 with the Tianhe-1A. That computer is now ranked fifth in the world with a theoretical peak speed of 4.7 petaflops, and uses processors from Intel and Nvidia.”
Last year, China built the Sunway Bluelight supercomputer with a domestically developer processor. “This was like a trial,” says Chen Dexun, a senior engineer at the supercomputing center where the 1-petaflop Sunway Bluelight machine is housed.”Before, we were always using U.S. chips, and so we wanted to see our abilities in making these processors,” he says.
China is not, however, the only country looking to make a 100-petaflop computer by 2015. The European Union, Japan and U.S. have also expressed intentions to work toward that goal.
In addition, China has plans to build a 1-exaflop (1,000 petaflop) computer by 2018.

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