October.29 (China Military News Reporting by Johnathan Weng) — The Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) unveiled Thursday China’s fastest supercomputer, also the World Third fastest computer, which is able to do more than one quadrillion calculations per second theoretically at its peak speed.

China name this supercomputer as “Tianhe-I” (天河一号 meaning River in Sky), which later will be installed in Tianjin. As matter of fact, Tianjin is one of two cities with “Super computing center”

China announces that “Tianhe-I”’s theoretical peak performance can reach 1.2 petaFLOPS and highest LINPACK score is 563.1 teraFLOPS. The rank of “Tianhe-I” peak performance has exceeded the JUGENE (1.0 petaFLOPS) of Jülich Research Centre and its LINPACK score overrun NASA’s Pleiades.

China says the birth of “Tianhe-1″ let China be the second country to develop petaFLOP level supercomputer beside U.S..

“Tianhe-I” has 6,144 Intel CPUs and 5,120 AMD GPUs, Total Memory is 98TB, point-to-point communication bandwidth is 40Gbps. “Tianhe-I” has 103 racks, weights 155 tons and occupies nearly 1,000 square metres. According to Chinese news resources, “Tianhe-I” will be used in computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules; physical simulations of airplanes and spaceships. China does not disclose whether this supercomputer will be used in military purposes, such as nuclear weapon development.

“Tianhe-I” has an Architecture of Vector processing Coordination Configurable Parallel System. “Tianhe-I” is one project of well-known “863 Plan” and was initiate in 2008.

Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) is also the developer of China’s first gigaFLOPS supercomputer “Yinhe”.

At present, the performance score has not been confirmed by Top500.org.

Here is a table of China’s supercomputer development histroy: