BEIJING -- China has unveiled a supercomputer incorporating thousands of graphics chips and capable of achieving a sustained performance of 2.5 petaflops.

In mid-November, the Top 500 list of supercomputers made it official: China’s Tianhe-1A topped the list. Placing second was the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Jaguar system, reported to run at 1.75 petaflops.

The race to the next level of supercomputing is on, with China declaring it will build by 2015 at least one system capable of 50 to 100 petaflops, and between 2016 and 2020 will build an exascale system (an exaflop is thousands times faster than a petaflop). The US has made initial steps in exascale funding but has not reserved funds specifically for work to begin.

Ed.: See Vardaman's related column, "Will IBM Be the Last of the Mainframe Makers?" in the January 2011 issue of CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY.