Researchers at Taiwan’s National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) have achieved another milestone in the world of supercomputing. The top supercomputer at the Island is likely to be used from July onwards and will carryout projects of scientific as well as academic nature. Its application will chiefly deliver solutions to complex biotechnological and climate studies.
The research budget of NT $300 million was exclusively funded by Taiwan Government. It took around six months to build the 25,600 computing cores forming the cluster. According to computing designer at NCHC, Wu Chou-Ching, it possesses the capability of carrying out 170 trillion floating point calculations in a second and is likely to be ranked in range of 50-55 on the Top500 list of most powerful supercomputers.
The machine is to be placed in NCHC and will be available to both government agencies and public universities. Mainly aimed at flourishing Taiwan’s top priority, biotechnology, the engineers have not revealed the name so far. China’s Tianhe-1A machine was ranked the fastest supercomputer on Top500 list in October last year that is capable of carrying out 2.67 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second.
“It’s just not for sure yet which sectors will use it for research,” Wu answered to a question when interviewed.
Further Reading: Taiwan builds supercomputer cluster for science
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