
Theoretically the fastest supercomputer in the world
Chinese boffins have installed one of the most powerful supercomputers ever designed in a research facility in Shenzen.
The Nebulae system is comprised from a shedload of Dawning Information
Industry TC3600 blade computers and it is already ranked the second
fastest computer on the planet. It apparently delivers 1.271 petaflops
per second, which is still somewhat lower than the US Department of
Energy's Jaguar, which is installed at the Oak Ridge nuke lab.
However, the Nebulae is powered by a combination of Intel X5650
processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 boards, with a total of 4,640 Tesla
parts. Thanks to the use of Tesla chips, the Nebulae is also quite a
bit more power efficient than the Jaguar. It consumes 2.55MW of power
compared to Jaguar's 7MW. The use of GPUs alongside CPUs should also
allow for a bit more flexibility and it has a higher peak performance
than the Jaguar. Interestingly, Jaguar is based on AMD six-cores and
its peak performance is 2.3 petaflops per second, while the Nebulae
could deliver 2.98 petaflops.
Interestingly, the company behind the Nebulae announced that it would use China's indigenous 16-core Loongson 3 processors in upcoming supercomputers.
More
here.