The fastest supercomputer is in China, the Tianhe-2, and runs at about 33.86 petaflops. Many countries say they intend to break the exaflop barrier in the next few decades. For some context, your single-core 2.5GHz PC has a theoretical performance of 10 gigaflops. Tianhe-2 is more than a million times faster than your computer.<\/p>\n
Although South Africa’s supercomputer, based at the Centre for High Performance Computing<\/a> is in the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world, it is not one of the front-runners in the field.<\/p>\n However, on Wednesday, Team South Africa “made jaws drop” at the international Student Cluster Challenge in Germany when the first-time entrant trumped all the other teams, including two from the United States and two from China, the Centre for High Performance Computing said. The centre co-ordinated the student team.<\/p>\n “In a real-time challenge, teams of six undergraduate and\/or high school students build small clusters of their own design on the [International Supercomputing Conference] exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications,” the centre said.<\/p>\n The South African team received the highest aggregate scores in the competition.<\/p>\n Supercomputing has become a South African focus, given the country’s status as one of the hosts of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA<\/a>), a giant radio telescope that will straddle both Africa and Australia. SKA South Africa project director Bernie Fanaroff<\/a> has said that the SKA will generate more raw data in one week than human kind has created in its entire existence.<\/p>\n Supercomputers will be required to crunch this data, and the country is trying to position itself as a player in this arena.<\/p>\n Referring to the student competition, the centre said: “The experience will assist South Africa grow a generation of high performance expertise for national economic development and for large projects such as the SKA.”<\/p>\n Article by Sarah Wild<\/em><\/p>\n Source: Mail & Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n AMD may bounce back in server market: analyst<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n MacBook Air refresh, new Mac Pro unveiled<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nMore on supercomputers<\/h3>\n
Chinese supercomputer now the world\u2019s fastest<\/a><\/h3>\n