China’s Tianhe-1A is now World’s Fastest Super-Computer

The Tianhe-1A, meaning Milky Way, a new supercomputer has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today.

With Tianhe-1A, China passed the US in the World’s fastest supercomputer. It was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China. The system is housed at National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin and is already fully operational and was costed over $88 million.

Tianhe-1A is the work of 200 scientists,  that makes groundbreaking performance record of 2.507 petaflops, or quatrillion calculations per second, making it the fastest system in the world today. Ordinarily the computer runs at 563.1 teraflops, or trillion calculations per second.

Compare this, as of June 2010, the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world combine for 32.4 petaflops of computing power and Chinese new supercomputer does 2.5 petaflops alone.

With the Tianhe-1A, GPUs now power two of the top three fastest computers in the world today. These GPU supercomputers are essential tools for scientists looking to turbocharge their rate of discovery.

The Super-Computer weights 155-ton and is cooled by 103 refrigerator-like cabinets lined up on an area of about 1,000 square meters. The Tianhe-1A will be employed in calculations of seismic data for oil exploration, conduct bio-medical computing and help design aerospace vehicles.

Tianhe-1A is powered by 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs. But the design is intuitive enough to beat 50,000 CPUs & half the floor space.

Tianhe-1A is energy efficient, saving enough power to provide electricity to over 5,000 homes for a year, Tianhe-1A consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it 3 times more power efficient compared to a 2.507 petaflop system built entirely with CPUs that would consume more than 12 megawatts and affording its yearly bill is $2.7 million.

The battle to build the fastest supercomputer has become a point of national pride as these high performance computers are used in a areas like defense, energy, finance, science.