China recently built the world’s fastest computer called the Tianhe-1A with speeds of up to 2.57 petaflops. The United States takes some comfort that it supplied a lot of the chips for the Tianhe but it wants the world record back. It is working in two places to create a computer that will go 10 times as fast, as in 20 petaflops, and the target date is 2012.
A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second. And a quadrillion is one followed by 24 zeros. An unimaginable number.
Top Wire XS reports one of the American computers will be in Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The second supercomputer is being built by IBM at their Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
In the top 500 supercomputers list, the US has the most at 275 while China comes second with 42.
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