“What Tianhe-1 can do in one day would take a regular computer 160 years to accomplish

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This post was last edited by XianYouZaiEr on October 30, 2009, at 19:37. It would take an ordinary microcomputer 160 years to perform the same amount of calculations that “Tianhe-1” can do in just one day. Staff members were introducing Tianhe-1 and its use in numerically simulating typhoons. China has successfully developed a petaflop-level computer. With the debut of China’s first domestically produced petaflop supercomputer in Changsha, Hunan on the 29th, China, as the inventor of the abacus—an ancient calculating device—now possesses the fastest computing tool in history. With a peak speed of 1206 trillion operations per second and a Linpack performance of 563.1 trillion operations per second, this computer named \"Tianhe-1\" topped the list of the top 100 supercomputers in China released on the same day. It also made China the second country in the world after the United States to be able to develop supercomputers with trillions of operations per second. The National University of Defense Technology is the developer of Tianhe-1. China’s first billion-cycle computer, “Galaxy-1”, which was introduced in 1983, was also developed at this university. Do you have Doritos? “To perform one day of computation on \"Tianhe-1,\" a computer equipped with an Intel dual-core CPU running at 2.5 GHz would need to work for 160 years. It is possible to store one photo of approximately 1MB per person across the country. Placing Tianhe-1 requires a room of nearly 1,000 square meters, and the current investment is 600 million RMB. The system-level software contains over 200,000 lines of code. At a rate of 20 lines of code per person per hour, it would take 10,000 hours. What can it do? Weather forecasts are the result of supercomputing. In the future, individuals will be able to inquire at any time about the weather conditions in a specific area during particular time periods. It generally takes 10 to 15 years to develop a new drug. Using supercomputers, it is possible to screen effective drug compounds from hundreds of thousands or even millions of compounds in a short amount of time. In the past, the design of Boeing aircraft required 3 years of testing in wind tunnels; with the use of supercomputers, the design cycle was reduced to 6 months.