Unveiled at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing (HPC China 2010) in Beijing, Tianhe-1A is considered the world’s fastest supercomputer with a performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark.
Designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in
China, it epitomizes modern heterogeneous computing by coupling
massively parallel GPUs with multi-core CPUs, enabling significant achievements in performance, size and power. The system uses 7,168 NVIDIA® Tesla™ M2050 GPUs
and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs; it would require more than 50,000 CPUs and
twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs
alone. It costs $88 million, its 103 cabinets weigh 155 tons, the entire
system consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity and it is already fully
operational.
Tianhe-1A ousted the previous record holder, Cray XT5 Jaguar, which
is used by the U.S. National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak
Ridge National Laboratories. It is powered by 224,162 Opteron CPUs and
achieves a performance record of 1.75 petaflops. According to Nvidia, Tianhe-1A will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations.
Note: NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, based on the CUDA™ parallel computing architecture, are designed specifically for high performance computing (HPC) environments and deliver transformative performance increases
across a wide range of HPC fields, including drug discovery, hurricane
and tsunami modeling, cancer research, car design, even studying the
formation of galaxies.
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