After developing the world’s fastest supercomputer in the year 2010 “Tianhe-1A” which was further succeeded by “Tianhe-2”, China is now planning to develop a new supercomputer which will be capable of performing more than a billion calculations per second. It will be 1000 times more powerful than Tianhe-1A.
It will be fully and independently developed by National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, the place where previous two supercomputers were developed. According to Meng Xiangfei, the head of applications department of National Supercomputer Center, a prototype of an “exascale” computer will be released by the year 2017 or 2018 which will be capable of performing at least 1 billion calculations per second. (Exascale computers are the computing systems which are capable of performing at least one exaFLOPS i.e. one billion-billion calculations in a single second.)
10 to 18 degrees of computational floating points operations per second will be done by the prototype and it will be mainly used in oil exploration data management, animation and video effects, biomedical data processing and high-end data manufacturing. Till the new prototype is launched in 2017 or 2018, the capacity of Tianhe-1A is being increased and currently it is performing more than 1,400 computational tasks and is serving about 1,000 users per day.
Although Tianhe-2 have more computational power than Tianhe-1A, Tianhe-1A is more widely used and the reason for the development of a supercomputer even more powerful than Tianhe-2 is that scientists are finding it difficult to run the most advanced applications at their optimum level on the existing supercomputers.
There a few major challenges in the development of an exascale computer such as memory concurrency and high power consumption. A lot of research work is going across the world to develop innovative processing capabilities using the multi-core processors which are economical and consume less power.
Steven's Computer Blog 