What is a petaflop? China crushes USA in supercomputer power by a factor of 5X!

In another sign the U.S. is slipping internationally, China has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, that is five times more powerful that the fastest U.S. supercomputer. It is also built with all Chinese microprocessors.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) - China has far surpassed the United States in supercomputer ability having unveiled the Sunway Taihu Light. This incredible machine is capable of performing at 124 petaflops. One petaflop is one quadrillion sustained floating point operations per second.

By comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the United States is the Titan Cray, which clocks in at a relatively sluggish 27 petaflops.

Historically, China has relied on American processors for its supercomputers, but the supply of these was cut off by an Obama executive order in July 2015 after concerns were expressed the Chinese were using their supercomputers to help develop their nuclear weapon capability.

However, the Chinese have been working on developing their own microprocessors for some time, wanting to escape dependency of U.S. chips.

Other countries are doing the same, developing their own chips to end U.S. dependency, including Japan and Europe. Russia also builds their own chips.

Of the world's top 500 supercomputers, China now has 167 on the list. This is up from just 10 systems a decade ago. China is now winning the petaflop competition with 211 total petaflop power across all their systems combined. The U.S. combined capability is just 173 petaflops.

Supercomputers can be used for a host of very complex simulations including weather forecasting and predicting what a nuclear explosion will do. They can be used for medical research and help discover effective treatments and cures. The provide very precise results when top notch precision is critical.

The first artificial intelligence, capable of emulating human thought will be a supercomputer with mainframe capability -that is the ability to perform many different functions simultaneously.

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