In a recent development, china has joined the league of a few nations who have top five supercomputers in their Kitty. The supercomputer named as Tianhe-1 placed at National Super Computer Center in Tianjin was placed fifth in the biannual Top 500 supercomputer list.

This computer has nearly 70, 000 chips and it can even calculate nearly 563 calculations per second (teraflops). The super computer is used for petroleum exploration and engineering tasks like simulating aircraft designs. The fastest supercomputer is US owned Jaguar supercomputer that has an immeasurable speed of 1.759 petaflops. One petaflop is equals to 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Another super computer is Cray that has more than 220,000 chips and is owned by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It is then used in conducting research in climate science, material science and nuclear energy.

The first computer to cross petaflop barrier was IBM computer owned by the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Presently it runs on 1.042 petaflops and employs the powerful “cell” chip designed for the PlayStation 3 and is used for monitor US nuclear stockpile, as well as conduct research into astronomy, genomics and climate change. Among all the 500 listed machines nearly 277 are ranked in United States. Europe has 153 systems on the list and even from that 44 machines are stayed at UK.  However, five top super computers are as following.

• Jaguar, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US. (1.759 petaflops; 224,162 processors)
• Roadrunner, Los Alamos National Laboratory, US (1.042 petaflops; 122,400 processors)
• Kraken XT5, University of Tennessee, US(831.7 teraflops; 98,928 processors)
• Jugene, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany (835.5 teraflops; 294,912 processors)
• Tianhe-1, National SuperComputer Center, China (563.1 teraflops; 71,680 processors)