China has laid claim to the top spot for World's Fastest Computer. China's new Tianhe-A1 weighs in at about 155 tons; Tianhe-A1 means "Milky Way" and can compute at 2,507 trillion calculations per second! In data processing jargon, that's 2.507 petaflops (a petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second).
Tianhe-A1 was developed at the National University of Defense Technology, under supervision of the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Education. Tianhe-A1, or "Milky Way" does its warp-speed "thinking" at the National Center for Supercomputing in Tianjin, China. Nvidia, the 
developer of the computing whiz, is utilizing the “Milky Way” for research, as a means of promoting its new and improved GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) as more flexible and diverse than those of Intel or AMD; these chips will soon be available in laptops and desktops.
The director of the Supercomputing Center, Liu Guangming, says the new computer is being used in trials in both the Tianjin Meteorological Bureau and the National Offshore Oil Corporation Data Center. In addition, it will serve in bio-medical research, in the animation industry, and in the field of astrophysics.
The Tianhe-A1 is comprised of 7,168 of the Nvidia GPUs, and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs, at a cost of about $88,000,000.00! For contrast, your home desktop, is comprised of about two CPUs and one GPU. The "Milky Way", now the fastest supercomputer ever made, clocks in at 1.4 times the pace of the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, "Jaguar" at Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
Article comments
1 - Mark Buckingham
Processing speed is the new arms race or sprint to the moon. Make it bigger and better, just because.
2 - El Bicho
Think how fast you could play solitare on it
3 - John Lake
China should be seen by all Americans as a valued ally. They are global and cosmopolitan, educated, have a booming economy; they see themselves as "second to none" in the modern world.
4 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
@4,
They have also been kicking our ass in building better cars that produce far less emissions for quite some time, manufacturing most of the electronics that we use & we owe them quite a bit of money. So, I'd say we better start acknowledging their place in the world or we're doomed.
5 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
@1,
Well, with all the knowledge we've gained from the space race, now it is possible to fly citizens into outer space. So, who knows what things will be possible with this type of achievement. I'm thinking, only more & more closer to Artificial Intelligence.
6 - John Lake
I agree.
7 - dick hertz
will it make their eyes close shut?
8 - John Lake
Tightly.
9 - Igor
I suppose the principle use for such a behemoth is in breaking PKE (Public Key Encryption) messages, and other types of encryption systems, such as that used for 'cookies'.
Of course, the indicated counter strategy is to use larger primes (in future encryptions), which then leaves only old cipher text susceptible to the behemoth. That may be enough for some old things.
So the hound chases the hare.