world's fastest supercomputer

world's fastest supercomputer

China is making the headlines because of its latest technological achievement, the title of the world's fastest supercomputer.

China's Tianhe-1 (天河一号) supercomputer leapfrogged the United States' Jaguar computer in computational speed.

Located at the National Center for Supercomputing in Tianjin, not far from Beijing. Tianhe is Chinese for “Milky Way”, named after our galaxy.

Even though the title belongs to China, there is a strong connection to the US's Silicon Valley. The Tianhe-1 was upgraded with 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 graphics processor units (GPUs) and 14,336 Intel Xeon central processing units (CPU) to give it the speed necessary to make it the world's fastest computer.

The Tianhe-1 gets its speed advantage from the Nvidia GPUs. Without the Nvidia GPUS, Tianhe, additional 50,000 Intel Xeons would have been required. The supercomputer would have taken twice the area to do the same amount of work.

Wired says, "the CPU-GPU combination also helps keep up power efficiency. The system consumes 4.04 megawatts, three times less than what it would have if it were built entirely with CPUs, claims Nvidia."

The Tianhe-1 runs with at an astonding speed of 2.507 petaflops, or quadrillion calculations per second. It surpassed the US Jaguar supercomputer, running 1.4 times as fast.