| Active | Tianhe-1 Operational 29 October 2009, Tianhe-1A Operational October 28, 2010 |
|---|---|
| Sponsors | National University of Defense Technology |
| Operators | National Supercomputing Center |
| Location | National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin, People's Republic of China |
| Speed | Tianhe-1: 563 teraFLOPS (Rmax), Tianhe-1A: 2.566 petaFLOPS (Rmax) |
| Ranking | TOP500: 2nd, June 2011 (Tianhe-1A) |
| Purpose | Petroleum exploration, aircraft simulation |
| Sources | top500.org |
| Tianhe-I | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 天河一号 | ||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 天河一號 | ||||||
| Literal meaning | "Milky Way No.1" | ||||||
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Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 (天河一号) (Mandarin pronunciation:pinyin: Tiānhé yīhào), in English, "Milky Way (literally, Sky River) Number One",[1] is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.566 petaFLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and is one of the few Petascale supercomputers in the world.[2][3]
In October 2010, an upgraded version of the machine (Tianhe-1A) overtook ORNL's Jaguar to become the world's fastest supercomputer, with a peak computing rate of 2.507 petaFLOPS.[4][5] In June 2011 the Tianhe-1A was overtaken by the K computer as the world's fastest supercomputer.[6]
Both the original Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-1A use a Linux-based operating system.[7][8]
Contents |
Tianhe-1 was developed by the Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Changsha, Hunan. It was first revealed to the public on 29 October 2009, and was immediately ranked as the world's fifth fastest supercomputer in the TOP500 list released at the 2009 Supercomputing Conference (SC09) held in Portland, Oregon, on 16 November 2009. Tianhe achieved a speed of 563 teraflops in its first Top 500 test and had a peak performance of 1.2 petaflops. Thus at startup, the system had an efficiency of 46%.[9][10] Originally, Tianhe-1 was powered by 4,096 Intel Xeon E5540 processors and 1,024 Intel Xeon E5450 processors, with 5,120 AMD graphics processing units (GPUs), which were made up of 2,560 dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards.[11][12]
In October 2010, Tianhe-1A, an upgraded supercomputer, was unveiled at HPC 2010 China.[13] It is now equipped with 14,336 Xeon X5670 processors and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 general purpose GPUs. 2,048 NUDT FT1000 heterogeneous processors are also installed in the system, but their computing power was not counted into the machine's official Linpack statistics as of October 2010.[14] Tianhe-1A has a theoretical peak performance of 4.701 petaflops.[15] NVIDIA suggests that it would have taken "50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone." The current heterogeneous system consumes 4.04 megawatts compared to over 12 megawatts had it been built only with CPUs.[16]
The Tianhe-1A system is composed of 112 computer cabinets, 12 storage cabinets, 6 communications cabinets, and 8 I/O cabinets. Each computer cabinet is composed of four frames, with each frame containing eight blades, plus a 16-port switching board. Each blade is composed of two computer nodes, with each computer node containing two Xeon X5670 6-core processors and one Nvidia M2050 GPU processor.[17] The system has 3584 total blades containing 7168 GPUs, and 14,336 CPUs, managed by the SLURM job scheduler.[18] The total disk storage of the systems is 2 Petabytes implemented as a Lustre clustered file system,[1] and the total memory size of the system is 262 Terabytes.[14]
Another significant reason for the increased performance of the upgraded Tianhe-1A system is the Chinese-designed NUDT custom designed proprietary high-speed interconnect called Arch that runs at 160 Gbps, twice the bandwidth of InfiniBand.[14]
The supercomputer is installed at the National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin, and is used to carry out computations for petroleum exploration and aircraft design.[10] It is an "open access" computer, meaning it provides services for other countries.[19] The supercomputer will be available to international clients.[20]
The computer cost $88 million to build. Approximately $20 million is spent annually for electricity and operating expenses. Approximately 200 workers are employed in its operation.
Tianhe-IA was ranked as the world's fastest supercomputer in the TOP500 list until July 2011 when the K computer overtook it.[21][22]
In June 2011, scientists at the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced a record-breaking scientific simulation on the Tianhe-1A supercomputer that furthers their research in solar energy. CAS-IPE scientists ran a complex molecular dynamics simulation on all 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to achieve a performance of 1.87 petaflops per second (about the same performance as 130,000 laptops).[23]
| Records | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Jaguar (computer) 1.75 petaflops |
World's most powerful supercomputer October 2010 – June 2011 |
Succeeded by K computer 8.2 petaflops |