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China's first petaflop supercomputer to be fully assembled in late August
The main components of the "Tianhe-1," China's first domestically-made petaflop supercomputer, have been transported to Binhai District in Tianjin, and the computer is expected to be fully assembled in late August, according to the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin on Aug. 5.
Three subsystems for computing, accessing the Internet, and input/output have reached Tianjin and are currently being installed. In addition, the supporting systems of cooling and power supply are ready for use. The "Tianhe-1" will be completely debugged after it is fully assembled, and if everything goes smoothly, it will be put into operation within 2010.
The "Tianhe-1" was successfully developed by the Changsha-based National University of Defense Technology in 2009, and China thus became the world's second country capable of developing petaflop supercomputers, only after the United States.
The "Tianhe-1" was ranked fifth on the list of the Top-500 supercomputers issued in November 2009. One–second calculations conducted by "Tianhe-1" are equivalent to 88 consecutive years of calculations by 1.3 billion people, and the data that the supercomputer can store is equivalent to the sum of the collections in four national libraries, each holding 27 million books.
The "Tianhe-1" will mainly be used for animation rendering, biomedical research, aerospace equipment development, processing of resource exploration and satellite remote sensing data, data analysis for financial engineering, weather forecasts, new materials development and design and theoretical calculations in general science.
