China's Right on the Tail of Jaguar Supercomputer in Top500

China’s ambition to become a major power in the supercomputing arena has become plainly obvious with the introduction of a supercomputing system nicknamed "Nebulae", which has earned the title of second-fastest supercomputer in the world with a Linpack performance of 1.271 PFlop/s. The Nebulae system itself is a hybrid design comprised of a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. Despite being ranked #2 on the Top500, Nebulae is currently praised as being the fastest system worldwide in theoretical peak performance which is rated at 2.98 PFlop/s, the highest ever seen in the Top500. For a quick reference at just how fast this system can crunch numbers, a single minute of calculations from the Nebulae system would take your home computer over three weeks to complete.

Currently the United States still dominates the list, holding the #1 spot with its Jaguar Supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee which has a peak performance of 1,750 trillion calculations per second. By comparison, the Jaguar System is over 33% faster than the Chinese contender but pales in comparison in theoretical yield which only reaches 2.3 petaflops. In addition to the Nebulae system, China has a total of 24 high performance systems on the Top500 with the Tianhe-1 supercomputer ranking in at number seven.

China is without a doubt rapidly becoming a major player in high performance computing and is seeking to solidify its holdings in the supercomputing world. Currently it is rumored that Dawning, the company responsible for the Nebulae machine, is currently developing an even faster machine for the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China. The main purpose behind this machine will be to model industrial research such as aircraft design, aerospace fundamentals, and petroleum exploration. In a stark contrast, many of the US machines which are owned by the government are used to monitor nuclear weapon stockpiles.

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