14 DAY TRIAL // Like all the segments of the IT industry, supercomputers have come a long way over the years. They have reached computational power beyond what people dared to dream a couple of decades ago. Additionally, those that create such clusters have begun experimenting with different approaches, such as GPU computing, while still making the best of the experience gained in many-core configurations. The Nebulae is a combination of both.
Nebulae is a high-performance computer (HPC) located at the newly built National Supercomputing Center in Shenzen, China. It is based on a Dawning TC3600 Blade system powered by Intel X5650 processors. In addition, it makes use of NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU computing modules and appears to have snatched the second leading position, in the upcoming TOP500 list.
The TOP500 list is issued twice a year and the latest version will be made official on June 21, 2010, at the ISC'10 Conference at the CCH-Congress Center in Hamburg, Germany. While the GREEN500 list deals with the energy efficiency of such machines, the TOP500 focuses on performance. The Jaguar was the winner of last year's second list, as it set a record of 1.75 petaflop/s performance in the Linpack benchmark. The new Nebulae 'only' managed 1.271 petaflop/s, but it outmatches the Jaguar in terms of theoretical peak performance (2.98 petaflop/s compared to 2.3 PFlop/s). This is possible thanks to the aforementioned NVIDIA computing modules.
The former leader, Roadrunner, with 1.04 petaflop/s in Linpack, fell to third place, whereas the IBM BlueGene/P, as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, reached the fifth position with a performance of 825.5 teraflop/s. What's more, seventh place belongs to yet another Chinese installation, Tianhe-1 (River in Sky), based at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin, and also a hybrid of Xeon chips and NVIDIA GPUs. More information is, naturally, available on the official website.