China Sets World Record with Fastest Supercomputer

As the race continues to pack more processing power in supercomputers, a Chinese scientific research center set a new performance record for these super machines. Built by the National University of Defense Technology, located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, a supercomputer was revealed on Thursday at the annual meeting of National High Performance Computing (HPC China 2010) in Beijing.

Labeled Tianhe-1A, the computer boasts a performance of 2.507 Petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. With sustained performance equivalent to 2.507 Petaflops, the Chinese supercomputer is 30 percent faster than the world's next most powerful supercomputer, which resides in Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, according to graphics chip maker Nvidia.

Tianhe-1A epitomizes modern heterogeneous computing by coupling massively parallel GPUs with multi-core CPUs, enabling significant achievements in performance, size and power, said Nvidia. Furthermore, the system uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs as opposed to requiring more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone, argued Nvidia.

Also, it was reported that Tianhe-1A uses 14,336 Intel (News - Alert) Xeon CPUs, and power consumption is only 4.04 watts. The total cost for the Chinese supercomputer is $88 million.

In a statement, Guangming Liu, chief of National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, said, "The performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible without GPUs. The scientific research that is now possible with a system of this scale is almost without limits; we could not be more pleased with the results."

"GPUs are redefining high performance computing," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia. "With the Tianhe-1A, GPUs now power two of the top three fastest computers in the world today. These GPU supercomputers are essential tools for scientists looking to turbocharge their rate of discovery."

Fully operational, the Tianhe-1A supercomputer will be operated as an open access system for large-scale scientific computations.