China's Tianhe-1A Deemed World's Fastest Computer
By wchung | 10 Sep, 2025

Speed Demon: The Cray XT5's speed record falls to a computer based in Tianjin, China.

Tianhe-1A was officially recognized as the world’s fastest computer at an industry conference in New Orleans Tuesday. The Tianjin-based supercomputer can perform 2.57 quadrillion operations per second and tops the 36th edition of the world’s top 500 supercomputers list.

This is the first time a Chinese supercomputer has won top ranking. In second place was the former number one — the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” operated by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee which is rated at 1.75 quadrillion operations a second while running Linpack, the benchmark used to measure supercomputer performance.

A task that would take one day for Tianhe-1A would take a dual-core personal computer about 160 years.

“The calculation amount per hour of Tianhe-1A is equal to the one calculated by 1.3 billion Chinese people together for 340 years,” said Li Nan, chief project manager of Tianhe-1A. Li has said that the supercomputer will be made available for use by foreign clients though it is currently used exclusively by domestic users.

The Tianhe-1A is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin where it is being used by 20 clients in fields like oil exploration, weather forecasting, high-end equipment development, bio-medical research, exploitation of new energy sources and new materials, engineering design and simulation analysis. The clients also include joint ventures like Tianjin Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co Ltd.

Tianhe-1A was developed by the Changsha-based National University of Defense Technology at an estimated cost of $90.4 million.

“The key to the high performance of Tianhe-1A is the hybrid architecture of the integration of the CPUs and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units),” said Yang Xuejun, Tianhe-1A’s chief designer and a professor at the National University of Defense Technology.

“Its CPUs and GPUs (graphic processing units) were from the US, the former by Intel and the latter by Nvidia,” said Jack Dongarra, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and supervisor of the Top 500 list.

Despite Tianhe-1A’s recognition experts continues to lag the U.S. and other nations in the research and production of core electronic devices and software, according to Qian Depei, team leader of Program 863, the high-performance computer section of China’s national high-tech development project.

TIANJIN (China Daily)