China’s Tianhe-1A Becomes the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

As far as technology goes, there’s little that’s quite as interesting as a supercomputer. They’re powerful beyond comprehension, and there are many of them scattered around the earth. It’s not too often though, that a new supercomputer gets announced that sets the bar much higher than before, but this past week, China managed to get it done, with its Tianhe-1A.

There are a couple of reasons that this supercomputer is so notable. For one, it’s become the fastest supercomputer on the planet, managing to take the crown from the USA, where a Cray XT5-HE, based in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, can push out a staggering 1.75 quadrillion (1000 trillion) calculations a second at its peak. The Tianhe-1A, by comparison, bumps that up to 2.5 quadrillion – a nice 43% boost.

Unlike most of the supercomputers out there, the Tianhe-1A also takes good advantage of both CPUs and GPUs, and given the performance numbers, the component numbers seem quite modest by comparison. In total, the entire supercomputer weighs about 133 tons, includes 14,000 Intel CPUs and 7,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Remember how I said earlier this week that NVIDIA could have done without that Quadro mishap? Yeah, I think this kind of publicity makes up for it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like China is using its supercomputer for much good so far, as it’s tackling mundane things like weather and doing work for the National Offshore Corporation. Pity, I was hoping to find out how few moves it would take to complete a 10×10 Rubik’s cube! *

* Yes, I am being sarcastic.

China’s Tianhe-1A (Milky Way) has taken over the top spot from America’s XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee that can carry out only 1.75 petaflops per second. One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The news about the machine broke just before the publication of the biennial Top 500 Supercomputer list which ranks the world’s most powerful machines. Prof Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, one of the computer scientists who helps to compile the list, said China’s claim was legitimate.