Worlds Fastest Supercomputer Tianhe-1A Uses 14,396 Intel Xeon 5600 Series CPUs
Intel Corporation today announced that its Intel Xeon 5600 series processors, announced earlier this year, are at the heart of the worlds most powerful supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A. Located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, Tianhe-1A contains 14,396 Intel processors accompanied by accelerator cards, and has demonstrated groundbreaking performance of 2.57 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second). Intel didn’t mention it, but we also know that Tianhe-1A also uses 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs to reach the ~2.6 petaflops that it is rated at. We were told that Tianhe-1A uses 4.04 megawatts of power when run at full load!
The 36th edition of the TOP500 list of supercomputers, as announced at SC10, Nov. 13-19 in New Orleans, shows that nearly 80 percent of the worlds top 500 systems have Intel processors inside. Such machines are increasingly featured in computers designed for geophysics, financial calculations and scientific research focusing on mainstream applications such as improving the safety of football players and enhancing medical imaging. According to the list, Intel chips now power four of the top six systems in addition to the No. 1 system. Xeon 5600 series processors are a key building block in the No. 3 system (Shenzhen), and the newly listed No. 4 system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The New Intel Xeon Processor 7500 series is featured in the Bull Supernode system at CEA, newly listed at No. 6. Overall, 398 new systems on the list feature Intel processors. According to the list, Intel processors are in 90 percent of the systems newly listed in 2010.
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