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takyon writes:

China may become the first country to turn on a 100 petaflops supercomputer, just one order of magnitude away from "exascale":

A little over one year ago, export blocks put in place by the US government threatened to derail China's plans to upgrade its Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the world's fastest since June 2013, to its originally planned peak capacity of 100 petaflops. At the time, many in the industry anticipated that the efforts to block China's supercomputing capability by banning access to US technology from Intel and other hardware vendors would backfire.

Indeed, China was sufficiently incentivized to redouble efforts on its homegrown supercomputing effort and it had the cash from the squashed Intel deal to do it. A couple months after news of the blacklist came out, China revealed plans to build not one, but two 100-petaflops supercomputers using a variety of native chip, accelerator and interconnect technologies. One of these systems was a fully-realized Tianhe-2, which was slated for a late-2016 launch.

VR World, the same publication who broke the blacklisting story last year, is now reporting that China is on track to announce a 100-petaflops supercomputer in June, during the 2016 International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. China had originally said it would have such a system in late-2016, but this is the same country that launched its 33-petaflops (LINPACK) Tianhe-2 two years early.

Original Submission