Tianhe-1A, a new supercomputer revealed today at HPC 2010 China, 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. The system uses 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs; it would require more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone. A 2.507 petaflop system built entirely with CPUs would consume more than 12 megawatts.
Thanks to the use of GPUs in a heterogeneous computing environment, Tianhe-1A consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it 3 times more power efficient — the difference in power consumption is enough to provide electricity to over 5000 homes for a year. Tianhe-1A designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China, will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations .
