IT and Society: China’s supercomputer confirmed the most powerful in the world

Within the framework of a traditional supercomputer conference SC 2010, New Orleans (USA) November 13 - 19 2010, was unveiled the publication of the latest list of Top 500 supercomputers on the planet. The new updated version became remarkable for several reasons: firstly, it features a new leader, secondly, the palm in the prestigious list has left the United States, where it had been from the launch of the rating (since 1993), and thirdly, powerful leaders became supercomputers of a brand new architecture, the so-called hybrid machines which combine two and even three types of computer processors.

It goes without saying that the development of such computers, which bring together key processors of general purpose (AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon), as well as specialized chips, like Cell or Nvidia Tesla processors, require much larger engineering efforts, brand new software, and what is more, the general structure of such solutions is much more sophisticated as compared to the traditional supercomputer, and contains tens of thousands of simple multicore processors.

It is a computer of such an architecture which has topped the latest list of 500 most powerful supercomputers. Such computers, combining central and graphic processors, which are able to perform parallel calculations of hundreds of data streams, are now being developed worldwide, however the most powerful computer was created in China. The new supercomputer Tianhe-1A, completed in September 2010, became the most powerful to date, leaving behind such experts as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Cray. China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer is capable of carrying out more than 2.5 thousand trillion calculations a second.

The Tianhe-1A takes up 112 racks within the center itself. On these rest 7,168 individual servers, each equipped with dual-socket, 2.93-GHz Intel Xeon X5670 processors and a single Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPU.

In the latest listing of the world's most powerful supercomputers Russia occupies 17th place with T-Platforms T-Blade2, Xeon 5570 2.93 GHz, Infiniband QDR.