Posted on 10/29/2010 11:49:49 PM PDT by ErnstStavroBlofeld
China has taken the lead in the supercomputer (the fastest computers on the planet) race, having built a 155 ton system using 7,168 GPUs (Graphic Processing Units, from high end graphic cards) and 14,336 CPUs to achieve peak performance of 2.507 petaflops (a petaflop is one million billion floating point operations per second, otherwise known as FLOPS). Sustained speed is 563 teraflops (one thousand billion). The Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer cost $88 million, requires 4.04 magawatts of power and occupies 1,000 square meters (10,764 square feet). Given that China manufactures a growing share of electronic items, and Chinese students have long dominated electronic engineering departments in American universities, this development should come as no surprise. Tianhe-1A will be used for civilian (oil exploration) and military (aircraft and missile design) applications. Meanwhile, DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense advanced research organization, has asked computer hardware developers to come up with a very powerful supercomputer (speed of one petaflop), that is small enough to fit into a cabinet 61x198x102 cm (24x78x40 inches) and require no more than 57 kilowatts to operate (including cooling). This ExtremeScale supercomputer would be flown out to combat zones, run off generator power and perform analysis of images and other data, to determine where the enemy is and what they are up to. This sort of predictive analysis has become a major weapon in the last decade, and it needs more computer power to be even more useful. There are currently portable PC cards that will goose a PC up to 20 teraflops (a thousand billion FLOPS). Currently, the most powerful PC can do 50 gigaflops (billion FLOPS). That, in turn, is faster than the fastest supercomputers of the early 1990s. In this area, progress isn't marching on, it's sprinting.
(Excerpt) Read more at strategypage.com ...
You can achieve alot when America ships all their jobs over to you in order to achieve their own self destruction.
Didn’t they achieve a very fast supercomputer simply linking playstation 3s, probably weighing under a hundred pounds and costing a few thousand bucks?
I was thinking the same thing.
Gotta love them “magawats”.
Gotta love them “magawatts”.
LOL
Add the ‘made in China’ tag to yet another gadget: the world’s fastest supercomputer. China says it has the most powerful computing system — a machine called Tianhe-1A. The supercomputer uses 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs (graphics processing units) and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs and is capable of clocking 2.507 petaflops or 2,507 trillion floating point calculations per second.
Just seems like the Chinese wasted a lot of material and money. I mean, measuring the weight of computers in tons seems so 1950’s.
That a lot of flops!
That we know about. Certain agencies probably have faster computers.
What happens when the softwares catches up to the hardware?
The ultimate efficacy of these supercomputers depends heavily upon the programs they are made to run being able to split their tasks more or less equally across all the individual processors in the machine. A badly designed program or an ill-suited problem will leave almost all the processors idle.
4.04 MEGAWATTS? What does it use for logic gates? 12AX7’s?
Herm
This is actually pretty darn reasonable for a massively parallel system of this size. Each GPU with a pair of processors is using about 500 watts. For each hundred watts it is getting several times the crunch power of a typical home PC that uses about a hundred watts.
And what makes you think they won’t have that? Recent events seem to suggest that the Chinese are becoming masters of cyberwarfare, or at least, better than everyone else considering all the practice they are getting...
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