supercomputer

China has topped the list of the twice-annual ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers, replacing the United States. In the latest ranking the Tianjin National Supercomputer Center's Tianhe-1A system benchmarked a performance of 2.67 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), surpassing the former top achiever, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Cray XT5 Jaguar system, which clocked in at 1.75 petaflops in this round.

Next year IBM wants to release its new chip that will be deployed in the University of Illinois supercomputer which is believed to become the world’s fastest.

The IBM Blue Waters project supercomputer will be able to perform complex calculations instantly and it will be housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus specifically for the computer that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today.