China to begin the use of the exascale supercomputer Tianhe -3 by 2020
Science and Technology
World
China is all set to operationalise the 'exascale supercomputer' by 2020 which will be capable of performing at least a billion billion calculations per second.
The supercomputer will be named Tianhe -3 and it will be operationalised three years before the US plan to install such computers.
The development of the ‘exascale supercomputer’ is part of the China’s national plan for the next generation of high performance computers. It will be developed during the 13th Five-Year-Plan period (2016-2020).
The government of Tianjin Binhai New Area, NUDT and the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin are working on the project.
In 2010, China unveiled the first petaflop supercomputer Tianhe-1 which is capable of performing at least a million billion calculations per second.
About Supercomputers
•A supercomputer is a computer with a high-level computational capacity compared to a general-purpose computer.
•Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
•Since its introduction in June 2013, China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer is the fastest in the world at 33.86 petaFLOPS (PFLOPS), or 33.86 quadrillions of FLOPS.
