China building a 100-petaflop supercomputer

Soon after the U.S. launched the world's fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops, China announced that it is building a machine that is intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015. The supercomputer, called Tianhe-2, will be placed at the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center and will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second).

The Chinese government is pushing the development of the country's supercomputing technology. It is aiming for China's supercomputers to reach 100 petaflops in 2015, and then 1 exaflop (1,000 petaflops), in 2018.

"Taking the top spot in the world's fastest supercomputers gave us a lot of drive, and gave us more confidence to develop better machines," Zhang Yunquan, a professor at the Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences said. But while China has largely relied on U.S. chips and software to develop its supercomputers, Zhang said this could gradually change as the country invests more in developing its own homegrown technology.

China isn't the only one aiming to deliver 100-petaflop computing by 2015. The European Union, Japan and the U.S. have similar ambitions, said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who also compiles the list of the world's top 500 supercomputers.

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