World's fastest supercomputer has performance equivalent to 2.5Petaflops

According to the chipmaker, the Tianhe-1A supercomputer has horsepower equivalent to 175,000 laptop computers, has a sustained performance equivalent to 2.5Petaflops and is 30% faster than the world's second most powerful supercomputer, based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. In total it incorporates 14,336 Intel Xeon processors and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 gpus. The Tianhe-1A was built by the National University of Defense Technology and is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin. It will be used by scientists across several fields and also be made available to other countries. While traditional central processors found in computers are designed to make huge calculations very quickly, one after another, graphics processors (gpus) excel at carrying out several small calculations at the same time. The graphics chips used in the Tianhe-1A are high end cards which Nvidia's vice president of product marketing, Ujesh Desai says is a direction the company is eager to explore. "If we want to grow beyond our traditional gaming market we need to expand our product portfolio and that's why we made a decision a couple of years ago to invest in making the gpu more programmable," Desai said.