In October 2010, a revolution took place in the world of high-performance com- puting. The Tianhe-1A, constructed by China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, came from total obscurity to seize the leading position among the world’s best performing supercomputers. With a maximum recorded computing speed of 2,566 TFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second), it performs nearly 50 percent faster than the second-place finisher, Cray’s Jaguar supercom- puter.
