By Herman Lai, posted Oct 28, 2010 at 6:18 AM, 424 views,

China’s Supercomputer Has The World’s Fastest System

Today, China revealed its new computer called Tianhe-1A, which just overtook US and the world, jump at the top of the title. Its performance scored 2.507 petaflops by using LINPACK benchmark, making it becomes the fastest computer in the world.

Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China, it will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations.

The computer built with over 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts in order to achieve the world’s fastest system, anyway, we’ll see if Tianhe-1A can maintain its title when the new Top500 supercomputers list is released next week.

More importantly, a 2.507 petaflop system built entirely with CPUs would consume more than 12 megawatts. However, Tianhe-1A consumes only 4.04 megawatts with the use of GPUs in a heterogeneous computing environment, which is making it 3 times more power efficient whereas the conservation of power would be enough to provide electricity to over 5000 homes for a year.

Source: NVIDIA via Engadget