Recently, China unveiled the Tianhe-1A supercomputer at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing in Beijing. The Tianhe-1A has a staggering 14,336 Intel Xeon processors and 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. What happens when you pump 4.04 megawatts of electricity through all that silicon? Well, LINPACK clocks the machine’s performance at 2.507 petaflops; the U.S. based Cray XT5 Jaguar, which did hold the top supercomputing spot, is benchmarked at 1.75 petaflops. The Tianhe, which cost $88 million to build, will be used for large scale scientific experiments and computations.
