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China's Tianhe-1A is world's fastest supercomputer, plans to usurp the West now complete
It happened. China just passed the US and the world with the reveal of the world's fastest supercomputer. The fully operational Tianhe-1A, located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, scored 2.507 petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. That moves it past Cray's 2.3 petaflops Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Tianhe-1A achieved the record using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts. Knowing that 10 petaflops is within reach by 2012, we'll see if Tianhe-1A can maintain its title when the new Top500 supercomputers list is released next week.
Tokyo Institute of Technology announces SSD-packing, 2.39 petaflop supercomputer
IBM has announced plans to start using SandForce SSDs in its enterprise machines, and now it looks like the Tokyo Institute of Technology is doing one better, working with NEC and HP to produce Tsubame 2.0. This next-gen supercomputer will reportedly operate at 2.39 petaflops (that's a lot of flops!) and uses a new multilevel storage architecture consisting of DRAM as well as SSDs. Not only will this bad boy have thirty times the computing capacity of Tsubame 1.0 (due in part to its some 2,816 Intel Westmere microprocessors and 4,224 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs), its power draw should be some 1/25th of its predecessor's. If all goes according to plan, it should be in operation this fall, at a cost of ¥3.2 billion (approx $35.5 million). [Thanks, Dylan]
