Undated photo shows the Tianhe-1A, a NUDT YH Cluster System in Tianjin, China. Tianhe-1A, a NUDT YH Cluster System at China's National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, is ranked No. 1 among the 36th edition of the World's TOP 500 Supercomputers with 2.566 PFlop/s Linpack Performance. [Xinhua]

Liu Guangming, director of the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, said Tianhe is a supercomputer system developed by the National University of Defense Technology. It works as a backbone node of Chinese National Grid.

"The operation of Tianhe will greatly promote the development of science and technology, economy and society of China," Liu said.

Rounding out the Top Five slots are two new systems: Tsubame 2.0 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology at number four, and Hopper, a Cray XE6 system at U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in California in the fifth spot.

Tsubame achieved a performance of 1.19 petaflop/s, while Hopper just broke the petaflop/s barrier with 1.05 petaflop/s.

Of the Top 10 systems, seven achieved performance at or above one petaflop/s. Five of the systems in the Top 10 are new to the list. Of the Top 10, five are in the United States and the others are in China, Japan, France, and Germany. The most powerful system in Europe is a Bull system at the French CEA (Atomic and Alternative Energies Commission), ranked number six.

(Xinhua News Agency November 17, 2010)