More than 500 global users from a range of industries, including oil exploration, biomedical science, aviation, and weather forecasting, are now making use of China’s Tianhe-1 supercomputer, which resides at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.
The Tianhe-1 runs more than 1,000 programs every day, and its users originate from countries such as the US, Singapore, and Spain, reports the state-run China News Service.
With a computing speed of 2.566 PFLOPS (peta-foating-point operations per second), the Tianhe-1 was the fastest supercomputer in the world in 2010. Its upgrade the Tianhe-2, with a speed of 33.86 PFLOPS, was ranked number one in the world again last week. This is the fourth time the Tianhe series has topped the list of world supercomputers in four years.
Luo Jun, vice director of the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin said that China has worked for more than thirty years in the supercomputing field, originally focusing on applications. The Yinhe-1, launched in 1978, was the starting point for China’s research into supercomputing, at a speed of 1 billion FLOPS in 1983. The next in the series, the Yinhe-2 reached a speed of 1 giga-FLOPS in 1997, and the Yinhe-3 had a speed of 10 GFLOPS.
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The Ministry of Science and Technology has made moves to enlarge the budget for supercomputing. From 2011 to 2015, more than US$32.5 million is being invested, and the figure is set to be even bigger from 2016 to 2020.
Full article: Now 500 global users of China’s Tianhe-1 supercomputer (Want China Times)
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