China in posession of world's fastest super-computer

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China's emergence as an economic superpower is now a matter of historic record, but now the Chinese may well be on the way to being the world's technological superpower, as the nation is now having the world's fastest supercomputer. Tianhe-1A is named after the Milky Way galaxy, and with its sustained 2.507 petaflop per second capacity, it has supplanted the fastest supercomputer in the US, the Cray XT5 Jaguar in Oak Ridge, Tennessee with its pitiful 1.75 petaflops per second. This petaflop business, by the way, refers to the trillions of calculations that these incredible machines can perform in a single second. The Tianhe-1A can routinely 2,507 trillion calculations a second. The news should not surprise anyone. China has been investing billions in computing in last few, and supercomputers are being pressed into service for everything from designing aeroplanes to probing the origins of the universe. They're also being used all over the world to model climate change scenarios. Tianhe-1A is kept in the city of Tianjin where, presumably to prevent it from growing bored and deciding to wipe out humanity with a race of killer robots, it has been used by the local weather bureau, and also by the National Offshore Oil Corporation. Researchers have also predicted it could be used for animation and bio-medical research. And yes, Liu Guangming, the National Centre for Supercomputing's director, really did put those last two in that order of priority. Supercomputers are great for research situations where you can't test a hypothesis by experiment, either because the calculations involved are just too complex, or because the effect you hope to observe is too brief or too small to register by traditional means. For those in the West still wishing to wave the flag of innovation, the chips used in the Tianhe-1A supercomputer were made by Intel and NVIDIA, but it was Chinese researchers who worked out how to wire them up to create the lightning-fast data transfer and computational power. As soon as you start mentioning trillions of calculations per second, of course, the numbers begin to sound a bit abstract to anyone without a background in computing. Even to say that the Tianhe-1A is twenty-nine million times more powerful than the earliest supercomputers of the 1970s is still almost meaningless - the human mind just can not process these mind-bogglingly huge scales. Luckily the Tianhe-1A can. The fact that China currently owns the world's fastest supercomputer is not really relevant to an understanding of the international league tables of computing power. It almost goes without saying that in 18 months time even 2.507 petaflops will look like pocket calculator stuff. The real story here is that China's unprecedented level of investment in supercomputing is resulting in huge numbers of software engineers coming out of the country. It is not the Tianhe-1A that spells the future of computing dominance, but the legions of computing experts of the future.