Skynet comes to life in China

The supercomputer Tianhe-2, capable of operating as fast as 33.86 petaflops per second, was developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, going forward to be known as Skynet.


Wired notes that the Tianhe-2, has more than 3 million processor cores, which effectively makes it the world's most powerful supercomputer. It can perform more than 30 quadrillion calculations per second, easily dwarfing the runner-up, an Oak Ridge National Laboratories machine known as Titan.



The United States, long the dominant power in supercomputing, won't have a comparable system until around 2016, when the U.S. Department of Energy is expected to build a Tihane-2-range supercomputer called Trinity. Tihane-2 probably will beat out all U.S. systems for a few years, which is more than a loss of bragging rights for the U.S. It raises questions about whether the U.S. is investing enough in research and development to keep its supercomputing lead.

It wasn’t supposed to get this close. Five years ago, the U.S. was on track to build a supercomputer on par with the Tihane-2. The plan is still to someday build these “exascale systems” — machines that are 30 times as powerful as Tihane-2 — but by 2010 the recession intervened and funding never materialized, says Horst Simon, Deputy Laboratory Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “At the same time that the Chinese have made this big step forward, the American investment is stagnating,” he says.