by Rich Brueckner, insideHPC
The National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China announced that their new Tianhe-1A supercomputer has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest system in the world. While these results have been submitted to TOP500.org, their semi-annual list of the world’s fastest systems will not be released until SC10 somewhere around November 15, 2010.

The announcement was made at the HPC China conference in Beijing. China has their own TOP100 list, and the Tianhe system is now far and away at the top of that list.

The second-generation Tianhe (pronounced “tee-awn-hoo-wa”) system is named after the Milky Way galaxy. A heterogeneous computer, Tianhe-1A uses a proprietary interconnect to couple massively parallel GPUs with multi-core CPUs, enabling significant advantages in performance, size and power.

The system uses 7168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs, 14,336 CPUs, and 262 Terabytes of distributed memory. With over 2 Petabytes of capacity, storage for the supercomputer is powered by the Lustre open source file system. To put the power of Tianhe in perspective, it would require more than 50,000 CPUs using three times as much power and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance.

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