A Chinese invention has a chance to come out on top of 500 fastest supercomputers. To date, the rating leader is the machine built by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee state. The speed of the Cray company's computer named Titan is 17.6 petaflops per second. In the nearest future fresh data for a new list will be released, and the supercomputer Tianhe-2, nicknamed Milkyway-2 , speed of which reaches 54.9 petaflops per second, is supposed to be number one. The Milkyway-2 has not just record technical characteristics, but also an unprecedented price – $290 mln. Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee, the rating founder and a supercomputer expert, commented on the results of the conference held by China's National University of Defense Technology. Tiahne-2 has 32,000 multicore Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge chips based on forthcoming design and about 48,000 Xeon Phi coprocessors based on Intel's Many Integrated Core architecture. These criteria will put the Chinese machine on the leading position in the global speed ranking. Although the microprocessors made in China has not been powerful enough, the supercomputer consists of some Chinese elements such as interconnects and 16-cored Galaxy FT-15 chips.
The U.S.A. is planning to start development of similar machines in 2015.
