China has built the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, which is capable of 2.57 quadrillion computing operations per second, pulling ahead of the United States in the global supercomputing race.

File photo of China's world-leading supercomputer, Tianhe-1A. (Xinhua File Photo)

The lead of the China-made system was officially confirmed by the 36th edition of TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, which was released Monday on the TOP500 list website.

The Tianhe-1A was followed by the former No. 1 system, the U.S.-made Cray XT5 "Jaguar" at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee.

The Jaguar system performs at 1.75 quadrillion operations per second, 92 percent slower than Tianhe-1A, running Linpack, the benchmark used to officially determine the speed of supercomputers.

The Tianhe-1A is installed at the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in north China port city of Tianjin, which specializes in super computing outsourcing services for complex work like the surveying of mines, the forecasting of weather, the design of high-end machinery, bioinformatics and large-data animation design.

Animation and biomedicine companies were queueing to book the services of the machine, said NSCC Tianjin Director Liu Guangming, who is heading for the U.S. to receive the certificate Tuesday.

Tianhe-1A's chief designer, Yang Xuejun, said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua, "The interconnection between CPUs and GPUs is key to the system's high performance.

"As there have been no precedents to integrate GPUs into a system for high-performance computing, we made much effort to improve the performance and efficiency of those GPUs," Yang said.

Another China-made supercomputer, Nebulae, which is a 1.27 petaflop-per second system, holds the third place on the TOP500 list.

Nebulae, developed by Dawning Information Industry Co., is equipped in a Shenzhen NSCC.

Jack Dongarra, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and supervisor of the TOP500 list, said in an e-mail interview with Xinhua, "It's more of a sign that China is serious in pursuing high performance computing to aid the growth of science, engineering and economic competitiveness.

"The long-term implication for the U.S. is that China is seriously interested in high performance computing, and is developing and deploying computing resources," said Dongarra, who leads research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

VietNamNet/Xinhuanet