3. Tianhe-2 (China) – $390 million
China’s Tianhe-2, translated to Milky Way-2 is the fastest current supercomputer in the world. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.
Currently located in National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, the machine was consecutively ranked #1 on TOP500’s list of fastest supercomputers, ever since 2013.
Sponsored by the 863 High Technology Program, it was initiated by the Chinese government and the government of Guangzhou province.
Built by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) after the US government rejected Intel’s application for an export license for the CPUs and coprocessor boards.
Tianhe-2 is able to perform 33,860 trillion calculations per second. One hour of these calculations by the supercomputer is the equivalent of 1,000 years of difficult sums by 1.3 billion people.
