China Builds The Fastest Supercomputer

The Strategy Page ^ | 10/29/2010 | The Strategy page

[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.

[HiTech RedNeck]

I’d be surprised if China can think of anything truly new before the rest of the world has.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

ECC83’s

[thatjoeguy]

Ah, finally a machine that can run Windows.

[rmlew]

4.04 MEGAWATTS? What does it use for logic gates? 12AX7’s?

"The supercomputer uses 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs (graphics processing units) and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs" Each NVIDIA Tesla M2050 uses 225W. I don't know which Xeon they are using. But each one uses 80, 95 or 130W. The Telsas use 1,612,800 watts. The Xeons use 1146880 (80W/cpu), 1,361,920 (95W/cpu), or 1,863,680 watts (130/cpu). They are probably using the last last as I assume they are using the Intel Xeon 7500. That 2 Megawats of power just for the CPUS and Teslas. Then add system boards, ram, hard drives, interconnects and networking, and above all heat dissapation and 4 MW is quite reasonable.