China's Tianhe-2 Becomes Fastest Supercomputer in the World, Taking the Crown from the U.S.

Move over, U.S., there's a new supercomputer--and it was built by China. The Tianhe-2 has officially taken the top spot on the latest list of the fastest 500 supercomputers. The new announcement means that the U.S.'s supercomputers are placed second and third while Japan's drops to fourth.

Tianhe-2 was actually developed by China's National University of Defense Technology. With a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark, the computer is the most powerful on the planet.  The performance score means that the computer can perform the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second. It possesses 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined, massive total of 3,120,000 computing cores, according to Top500.

Once every six months, a list is released that reveals the 500 top supercomputers. Overseen by Hans Meuer, professor of computer science at the University of Mannheim, this list allows scientists--and countries--to keep track of who has the best and fastest computers. The last time China topped the charts was actually between November 2010 and June 2011, according to BBC News.

What's unusual about the announcement isn't that China won; it's the fact that the system wasn't expected to be ready until 2015. China actually plans to install the new computer at the National Supercomputer Center at Guangzhou, based in the country's southeastern Guandong province. There, it will be offered as both a research and education resource to southern China, according to BBC News.

The Tianhe-2, or the Milky Way-2, is noteworthy in a number of ways. According to Top500 Editor Jack Dongarra, "Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part. That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese."

It looks like China may be on top for a while. The U.S. isn't due to acquire another supercomputer until 2015. Until then, it's likely that China and Japan will vie for the top spot.