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China unveils powerful 2.5 petaflop supercomputer and NVIDIA help with their Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs for this supercomputer.Tianhe-1A is world’s fastest supercomputer…..

Tianhe-1A, a new supercomputer revealed today at HPC 2010 China, has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today.Tianhe-1A epitomizes modern heterogeneous computing by coupling massively parallel GPUs with multi-core CPUs, enabling significant achievements in performance, size and power. The system uses 7,168 NVIDIA® Tesla™ M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs; it would require more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone.

More importantly, a 2.507 petaflop system built entirely with CPUs would consume more than 12 megawatts. Thanks to the use of GPUs in a heterogeneous computing environment, Tianhe-1A consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it 3 times more power efficient — the difference in power consumption is enough to provide electricity to over 5000 homes for a year.Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China. The system is housed at National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin and is already fully operational.NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, based on the CUDA™ parallel computing architecture, are designed specifically for high performance computing (HPC) environments and deliver transformative performance increases across a wide range of HPC fields, including drug discovery, hurricane and tsunami modeling, cancer research, car design, even studying the formation of galaxies.

Thanks :pressroom.nvidia.com