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Tianhe-1A

Is China a supercomputer threat? (Q&A)

With China expected to officially take the supercomputer performance crown next month, I asked an expert about the state of supercomputing in the U.S. and whether China poses a long-term threat to the United States' current preeminence in supercomputing.

Nvidia announced yesterday that its chips are powering the "Tianhe-1A" Chinese supercomputer that achieved 2.507 petaflops, beating a U.S.-based system that is currently ranked No. 1 on the June Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The Chinese system is a unique hybrid design that uses approximately 7,000 Nvidia graphics chips along with 14,000 Intel Xeon CPUs. The graphics chips are what give the system the extra oomph to catapult it into the top supercomputer spot.

I spoke with Jack Dongarra, university distinguished professor at University of Tennessee's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and part of a group from the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Georgia Tech that recently purchased a hybrid system. It is important to note that Oak Ridge houses the supercomputer, dubbed "Jaguar," cited above that is currently ranked No. 1 in the world based on the Top500 June list: it is not a hybrid system.

Q: Does Oak Ridge have anything analogous to the Chinese hybrid system? Dongarra: Oak Ridge has a small version of a machine that is hybrid in nature. So, this is an acquisition that just took place...out of a grant from the National Science Foundation. It involved Oak Ridge National Labs, University of Tennessee, and Georgia Tech. But it's much, much smaller than the Chinese system. The machine is in place and testing is being carried out at Oak Ridge. A node has two Intel Westmere chips and three Nvidia Fermi boards. There are… Read more

Nvidia helps China to supercomputer crown

Nvidia chips are powering a Chinese supercomputer that the graphics chip supplier claims has achieved the fastest speeds to date. The "Tianhe-1A" has hit 2.507 petaflops, beating a system at Tennessee-based Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

The new system would top another Chinese supercomputer also using Nvidia chips called Nebulae, rated at 1.271 petaflops (one petaflop is one thousand trillion operations per second). Both the Nebulae and Tianhe-1A performance ratings are based on the Linpack benchmark, the most widely used performance yardstick for supercomputers. Nebulae is currently rated No. 2 in the world based on the Top500 June list. The Oak Ridge system is rated the fastest at 1.75 petaflops, according to the Top500 June list. Tianhe-1A will top the supercomputer list at a Chinese conference that starts tomorrow.

Tianhe-1A combines 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 graphics processing units (GPUs) with 14,336 Intel Xeon central processing units (CPUs). Nvidia is not only claiming the performance crown but a greener supercomputer, as well. The machine consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it three times more power efficient than a CPU-only system, Nvidia said in a statement.

High-end GPUs typically contain hundreds of processing cores, allowing them to accelerate certain types of computational tasks more efficiently and thereby much faster than CPUs.

The machine, which is already fully operational, was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and is housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin… Read more