Tianhe-1A, China's Supercomputer
Unveiled at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing (HPC China 2010) in Beijing, Tianhe-1A (Milky Way) is the world’s fastest supercomputer, with a performance record of 2.507 petaflops.
China’s Tianhe-1A has taken top spot from America’s XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee that can carry out only 1.75 petaflops.
COMPUTING POWER:
1. One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
2. The Tianhe-1A supercomputer has the computing power of 175,000 laptops.
PERSPECTIVE:
1. one second on a PC is equal to 10 hours on the Tianhe-1A super computer.
2. a minute is equilivent to 25 days.
3. An hour is equilivent to 4 years
4. 24 hours is equilivent to 100 years.
As measured by the LINPACK benchmark, the Tianhe-1A is 2 times faster than its rival, America’s XT5 Jaguar.
The, Tianhe-1A System Spec’s:
1. 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs (Graphicial Processing Units)
2. 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs.
3. It cost $88 million USD.
4. It’s 103 cabinets weigh 155 tons,
5. and the entire system consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity.
The American, Cray XT5 Jaguar uses, 1. 224,162 Opteron CPUs and and achieves a sustained performance record of 1.75 petaflops.
The Peak perfomance of the Cray XT5 Jaguar rates in at 2.66 petaflops, while the Tianhe-1A has a Linpack benchmark performance of 2.507 petaflops, according to Nvidia. The Linpack number is 1.7 for the Jaguar, two times slower than 2.5 for the Tianhe-1A.
The Tianhe-1A operates at one-third the power and at one half the size of the Jagquar, according to NVIDIA.
Linpack is the metric for how fast a machine can sustain performance on applications.
The Tianhe-1A carries out 2.5 thousand trillion calculations a second.
Tianhe-1A is unusual in that it unites thousands of Intel processors with thousands of graphics cards made by Nvidia.
Based in China’s National Center for Supercomputing in the city of Tianjin, the computer has already started to do work for the local weather service and the National Offshore Oil Corporation.
The new supercomputer will be operated as an “open access” system, available to other countries outside of China to use for large scale scientific computation.
The claim to be the fastest machine on the planet has been ratified by the Top 500 Organisation which maintains a list of the most powerful machines.
Tianhe-1A is unusual in that it unites thousands of Intel processors with thousands of graphics cards made by Nvidia.
It would require more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone.
By uniting graphics cards and CPU’s the Tianhe-1A can not only perform complicated arithmetical oeprations very quickly but also run anything that comes its way.
Designed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, the Tianhe-1A is fully operational now.
The Oak Ridge Lab is working on an Nvidia Fermi-based supercomputer, to be built by Cray and expected to be complete in 2012.
