Hasta La Gadget!

Add the ‘made in China’ tag to yet another gadget: the world’s fastest supercomputer. China says it has the most powerful computing system — a machine called Tianhe-1A.

The supercomputer uses 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs (graphics processing units) and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs and is capable of clocking 2.507 petaflops or 2,507 trillion floating point calculations per second.

The Tianhe-1A will take the top spot from the U.S. Cray XT5 aka ‘Jaguar’ that’s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Jaguar can clock 1.759 petaflops and is built using 37,376 AMD processors.

The Tianhe-1A is interesting because it combines CPU and GPUs — much like desktop PCs — to create the world’s most powerful machine. In fact, Nvidia, claims if its GPUs weren’t used, then it would have taken 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to create a comparable computer.

The Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology in China and will be operated as an open access system for large scientific computations.

The use of GPUs in high performance computing is on the rise. Once seen in PCs used largely for multimedia and gaming, GPU-based computing has become more popular among researchers for its ability to offer raw computing power. While CPU are critical to a PC for their ability to interact with the different computing elements such as memory and disk drives, GPUs can perform specialized tasks especially related to graphics and visual computations that working in tandem with CPUs can speed up computing.

The CPU-GPU combination also helps keep up power efficiency. The system consumes 4.04 megawatts, three times less than what it would have if it were built entirely with CPUs, claims Nvidia.

Overall, the Tianhe-1A is a computing monster. It has 262 terabytes of memory and is housed in 140 refrigerator-sized cabinets.

See Also:

• Sony’s PS3 Update Could Affect Supercomputer Users
• Android Phones Can Substitute for Supercomputers
• How to Upgrade a Supercomputer, 37376 Chips at a Time
• Toshiba Crams Supercomputer Guts Into 3-D, Web TV
• Microsoft, Cray Unleash $25K Supercomputer
• Water-Cooled Supercomputer Doubles as Dorm Space Heater

Photo: Nvidia

It happened. China just passed the US and the world with the reveal of the world’s fastest supercomputer. The fully operational Tianhe-1A, located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, scored 2.507 petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. That moves it past Cray’s 2.3 petaflops Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Tianhe-1A achieved the record using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts. Knowing that 10 petaflops is within reach by 2012, we’ll see if Tianhe-1A can maintain its title when the new Top500 supercomputers list is released next week.

China’s Tianhe-1A is world’s fastest supercomputer, plans to usurp the West now complete originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 01:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What’s this, a bit of intrigue from NVIDIA? The company is due for a refresh on its DirectX 11 line and, with AMD’s Cayman series floating its way to availability on crystal-clear waters, the competition appears to be teasing its response. NVIDIA briefly listed a card called the GTX 580 on its System Requirements page and, while we don’t know how long it was there, it was quickly pulled after news of its presence started making the rounds. Accidental addition or the intentional planting of a seed of doubt in the minds of AMD fans? We’ll never know, and we don’t know the details of the card either, but expectations are that it contains 40nm construction with 512 CUDA cores, 2GB of GDDR5 memory, and a due date before the end of the year. That should give you plenty of time to upgrade your power supply… again.

[Thanks, Musouka]

NVIDIA lists unannounced GTX 580 graphics card on its page, quickly puts it back in hiding originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 23 Oct 2010 16:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was rumored back in August for a September release and, though it did miss that by a full month, we’re definite believers of “Better late than never.” The ASUS 1015PN is officially the newest entry in the Eee PC family with its 10.1-inch, 1024 x 600 LCD, a dual-core Atom N550 processor, 1GB of RAM, 250GB of platter-based storage, and, perhaps most importantly, NVIDIA Ion 2 graphics that won’t put a hurting on your battery life thanks to Optimus switching tech. That means an estimated 9.5 hours of longevity on a charge so long as you don’t spend your time pumping out reams of legally acquired full HD test footage. If all that sounds good you can order yours right now for around $429.

ASUS Eee PC 1015PN gets official, will do 1080p in a pinch originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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June was a lifetime ago, we’ll give you that, but surely you can’t forget those 16 Optimus-based laptops that NVIDIA teased us with at Computex, right? Right. At any rate, MSI has just come clean with a delightful pair of them, the FX700 and FR700. Both of these beasts boast 17.3-inch widescreen displays, the company’s own anti-scratch, anti-smudge coating and a design that actually looks fairly attractive given the hugeness. The former also includes up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, a Core i5 processor, NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 425M (1GB), HDMI / VGA outputs, 320/500/640GB hard drives, a DVD SuperMulti drive, four USB ports (two of the SuperSpeed variety), a 5-in-1 card reader, inbuilt webcam, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, gigabit Ethernet and a 6-cell Li-ion that’ll probably exhaust itself long before you’d like it to. The FR700 includes most of the same specifications, but opts for integrated Intel graphics for those who aren’t planning to dabble too long in Crysis. Per usual, MSI’s keeping quiet when it comes to pricing and release details, but we’d be shocked if they didn’t find their way onto retail shelves pre-Christmas.

MSI gets official with 17.3-inch FX700 and FR700 multimedia laptops originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Oct 2010 18:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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