The Nebulae: World's Fastest Supercomputer

China's ambition to enter the supercomputing arena, among other areas of world competitiveness, because clearer this week with a system called Nebulae, build from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. Nebulae is currently the fastest system worldwide in theoretical peak performance at 2.98 petaflops per second (PFlop/s). A petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. China now runs 24 of the top 500 computers in the world, and two placed in the top 10.