China's Tianhe-A1 lauded as world's most oomph-worthy supercomputer

by Steven Mostyn - Oct 29 2010, 05:46

While the existence of supercomputers may not directly affect your life, and you’ll certainly never own one (the iPad doesn’t count), we thought you’d like to know a little more about the world’s most muscular computer, which the Chinese are claiming is the Tianhe-1A.

Residing at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, near Beijing, the hulking Tianhe-A1 has apparently established a new processing record after churning through 2.507 petaflops of performance (2,507 trillions calculations per second) – which, if accurate blows past the previous benchmark of 1.75 petaflops set by America’s Cray XT5 Jaguar.

Although China is holding the Tianhe-A1 aloft as the world’s most powerful computer, official confirmation of its oomph won’t be forthcoming until the Top 500 listing is published during November’s International Supercomputing Conference in Germany.

So what does the Tianhe-A1 have growling ominously beneath its hood, we hear you ask? Well, it carries a whopping 14,336 Intel Xeon central processors and a formidable 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 graphics processors. By way of comparison where process-pumping hardware is concerned, the XT5 Jaguar is powered by 224,162 AMD Opteron processors.

Developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology and currently used to chew through mind-bending scientific computations, the Tianhe-A1 sucks up a huge 4.04 megawatts of energy through its 103 computer racks, which cover around 17,000 square feet of floor space.

According to last year’s Top 500 list of supercomputers, more than half were housed in the United States, while China could only lay claim to 24. However, the existence of Tianhe-A1 and billions of dollars of investment in the field of supercomputing clearly shows China’s intent.

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