The 10 fastest computers in the world

The 10 fastest computers in the worldHopper hopes to save the planet (credit: NERSC) Related stories Speed Week on TechRadar Intel: 'We could easily have CPUs with hundreds of cores' How to build the ultimate speed PC This article is brought to you in association withLG Optimus 2X If you thought your PC was fast, wait until you see what Tianhe-1A can do: the Intel and Nvidia-powered supercomputer can do in a day what a dual-core personal computer would take 160 years to complete. It's a serious bit of kit, and it's not the only supercomputer with more cores than we've had hot dinners. Every six months, the TOP500 project ranks the world's most powerful computers - and right now, these are the top ten machines the world has ever seen. 1. The slightly mysterious Chinese one: Tianhe-1A China's supercomputer is currently the world's fastest: it can run at a sustained 2.5 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) thanks to its 186,368 cores and 229,376GB of RAM. While the horsepower comes from off-the-shelf Intel and Nvidia chips, the New York Times says that the Chinese machine's speed is down to its interconnect, the networking technology that connects the individual nodes of the computer together, which is twice as fast as the InfiniBand technology used in many other supercomputers. It's located in Shenzhen's National Supercomputing Centre, where it's used by universities and Chinese companies.