This article first appeared on Floating Path.
China’s National University of Defense Technology rolled out their newest supercomputer earlier this year, the Tianhe-2, which is now being billed as the world’s fastest by nearly a 2 to 1 margin.
With the intention of working in government security applications, Tianhe-2 has the capacity to perform at 33.86 petaflops, which is equivalent to about 3.4 million typical home PCs. The previous champ, Oak Ridge National Lab’s Titan, runs at 17.59 petaflops. With the capacity to perform over 38 quadrillion calculations per second, and China’s propensity for cyber attacks, the Tianhe-2 has surely caught the attention of defense officials in Washington.
The majority of the $390 million computer was manufactured and assembled in China. However, Tianhe-2 does use Intel chips along with foreign-made software. The system is also able to “operate traffic lights, predict earthquakes, be used in pharmaceutical and car industries, and create movie special effects” and has a total CPU processing memory of 1,375 terabytes.
