Fastest Supercomputer Uses Over 7,000 nVida GPUs and 14,000 Intel Xeons

The world's fastest supercomputer was unveiled Wednesday at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing in Beijing (HPC China 2010).

Tianhe-1A as it is known was designed by the National University of Defense Technology in China and has a performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark.

To achieve this new performance record, Tianhe-1A used $88 million worth of hardware including 7,168 nVidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs. The entire computer system consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity.

The previous record holder, Cray XT5 Jaguar, which is being used by the U.S. National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, uses 224,162 Opteron CPUs and achieves a performance record of 1.75 petaflops.

The new record holder, Tianhe-1A will operate as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations.

[Source: Mashable]