"Milky Way" is the name chosen for the most powerful supercomputers in the world: China reached the summit with the Tianhe-1A. Exceeds the previous record of 40%: 2507 can perform teraflops of floating point operations. It shines a spotlight on a generation of hybrid megacervelloni combining the computing power of about 21 thousand microprocessors designed in the U.S.: 14 thousand are being manufactured by Intel and NVIDIA graphics chips are 7 thousand.
applications for pharmaceutical research, weather and military capabilities require advanced visual processing. A building has been a Chinese university of excellence, the National University of Defense Technology (Nudt). But Tianhe-1A can rely on technologies developed in-house for connections: according to the University of Tennessee is able to double the bandwidth of traditional links Infiniband for high performance computing.
"Milky Way" will also contribute to scientific research: give part of his power in international projects. So far, the record was "Jaguar" (Cray XT5) in Oak Ridge laboratory, used for environmental studies and energy. At the time the third position is occupied by another big Chinese Nebula. But not built the first supercomputer in the United States to reach the summit was the Japanese Earth Simulator in 2002.
megacervelloni In the list of 500 most powerful in the world are seven Italians, led by the computer center CINECA in Bologna. Two others are used for research (Chile and Sardinia Research) and four are used by private telecommunications and energy. The needs of the scientific community have fueled the construction of international networks for the calculation: are laboratories where the overall national centers offer their resources for joint initiatives. For example, data collected after the experiments in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are analyzed through the "LHC computing grid "that connects 140 sites. Users may also help by taking home the computing power of their computers when they are unused: the BOINC project of the University of Berkeley, you can download the software and participate in the research on proteins, the identification other forms of intelligence in the galaxy (SETI @ home initiative) and climate change.
source: 24h Ilsole
