View the World: World’s Fastest Supercomputer-Tianhe

Sunday, June 26, 2011

World’s Fastest Supercomputer-Tianhe

Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 , in English, "Milky Way (literally, Sky River) Number One", is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.566 petaFLOPS; that is, over 2½ quadrillion (thousand million million) floating point operations per second, or FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and is one of the few Petascale supercomputers in the world.

In October 2010, an upgraded version of the machine (Tianhe-1A) overtook ORNL's Jaguar to become the world's fastest supercomputer, with a peak computing rate of 2.507 petaFLOPS. In June 2011 the Tianhe-1A was overtaken by the K computer as the world's fastest supercomputer.
In October 2010, Tianhe-1A, an upgraded supercomputer, was unveiled at HPC 2010 China. It is now equipped with 14,336 Xeon X5670 processors and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 general purpose GPUs. 2,048 NUDT FT1000 heterogeneous processors are also installed in the system, but their computing power was not counted into the machine's official Linpack statistics as of October 2010. Tianhe-1A has a theoretical peak performance of 4.701 petaflops. NVIDIA suggests that it would have taken "50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone." The current heterogeneous system consumes 4.04 megawatts compared to over 12 megawatts had it been built only with CPUs.

The Tianhe-1A system is composed of 112 computer cabinets, 12 storage cabinets, 6 communications cabinets, and 8 I/O cabinets. Each computer cabinet is composed of four frames, with each frame containing eight blades, plus a 16-port switching board. Each blade is composed of two computer nodes, with each computer node containing two Xeon X5670 6-core processors and one Nvidia M2050 GPU processor. The system has 3584 total blades containing 7168 GPUs, and 14,336 CPUs, managed by the SLURM job scheduler.[18] The total disk storage of the systems is 2 Petabytes implemented as a Lustre clustered file system,and the total memory size of the system is 262 Terabytes.

Another significant reason for the increased performance of the upgraded Tianhe-1A system is the Chinese-designed NUDT custom designed proprietary high-speed interconnect called Arch that runs at 160 Gbps, twice the bandwidth of InfiniBand.

The supercomputer is installed at the National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin, and is used to carry out computations for petroleum exploration and aircraft design. It is an "open access" computer, meaning it provides services for other countries. The supercomputer will be available to international clients.

The computer had cost $88 million to build and around $20 million annually for costs involving energy intake and operating costs. It also has to have 200 workers in order to have it operate and function properly.

Tianhe-IA is ranked as the world's second fastest supercomputer in the TOP500 list