Rahasia : China Supercomputer Tianhe-1A is World’s Fastest Computer

China’s National University of Defense Technology may have designed the world’s fastest supercomputer with speeds 43 percent greater than previous systems. The Tianhe-1A machine housed at the National Center for Supercomputing in the northern port city of Tianjin is capable of sustained computing of 2.507 petaflops, the equivalent of 2,507 trillion calculations, per second.

The computer, which has over 7,168 M2050 graphics cards from Nvidia at a cost of $2,500 each, and 14,336 processors from Intel, is under lock and key with the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Education prior to its big unveil later today. Tianhe-1A ousted the previous record holder, Cray XT5 Jaguar, which is used by the U.S. National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. It is powered by 224,162 Opteron CPUs and achieves a performance record of 1.75 petaflops.
China is investing in supercomputers to improve research and simulation for climate modeling, genomics, alternative energy, seismic imaging and defense. Since China began investing in the technology in 2002, it has risen to third globally in overall high-performance computing power, trailing the U.S. and the European Union.
“The performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible without GPUs. The scientific research that is now possible with a system of this scale is almost without limits; we could not be more pleased with the results,” Guangming Liu, chief of National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin said.
Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA siad, “GPUs are redefining high performance computing. 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 Tianhe-1A supercomputer will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations.
“They’ve basically recognized the fact that they need to invest in high-performance computing to continue to advance their technology, to continue to advance their research and science,” Sumit Gupta, senior product manager for Nvidia said. “This is recognition that the United States had about 50 years ago.”