বৃহস্পতিবার, ১৪ জুন, ২০১২

China takes top spot with 2.5-petaflop supercomputer

The fully operational Tianhe-1A, located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, has been scored at 2.507 petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. The result was announced Thursday at HPC 2010 China.

That score moves it past Cray's 2.3-petaflop Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. The newest Tianhe, which is Chinese for “River in the Sky” or “Milky Way”, achieved the record using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts. It operates with 262 TB of main memory and 2 PB of storage and boasts a proprietary interconnect technology developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology. Tianhe-1A epitomizes modern heterogeneous computing by coupling massively parallel GPUs with multi-core CPUs.

According to graphical processing unit manufacturer NVIDIA, which contributed heavily to the project, it would require more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone. More importantly, a 2.507 petaflop system built entirely with CPUs would consume more than 12 MW. The use of GPUs in a heterogeneous computing environment allows Tianhe-1A to consume only 4.04 MW, making it three times more power efficient. The difference in power consumption is enough to provide electricity to over 5,000 homes for a year.

"The performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible without GPUs," said Guangming Liu, chief of National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin.

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