Intel strikes back [News]

When computer scientist Jack Dongarra traveled to China in May to see the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, he was ready to be impressed. And the machine, built by the National University of Defense Technology, in Changsha, didn´t disappoint. By early June, Tianhe-2 had demonstrated a peak speed of 33.86 petaflops: some 34 million billion floating point operations per second, far more than what it needed to place first on June´s Top500, a biannual list of the fastest supercomputers, compiled and adjudicated by Dongarra and his colleagues.