China supercomputer takes the global computing crown

A Chinese supercomputer performing more than 33 quadrillion calculations per second has taken the computing crown on a list of the world's fastest computers. The Top500 list, updated twice a year at the International Supercomputing Conference, put the Tianhe-2 computer at the top of its list that measures performance for huge systems normally built for tasks like modeling nuclear weapons explosions and forecasting global climate changes, CNET reported Monday. Tianhe-2 has gone online two years earlier than expected to claim the top spot, it said. The Chinese machine, at the National University of Defense Technology, runs 32,000 Xeon processors boosted by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors for a total of 3.12 million processor cores, and possesses 1 petabyte of memory. The Tianhe-2 puts China on top of the list for the first time since the Tianhe-1 was ranked the world's fastest supercomputer in 2010.