 | |
| Active | Tianhe-1 Operational 29 October 2009, Tianhe-1A Operational 28 October 2010 |
|---|---|
| Sponsors | National University of Defense Technology |
| Operators | National Supercomputing Center |
| Location | National Supercomputing Center,Tianjin,People's Republic of China |
| Operating system | Linux[1] |
| Memory | 96 TB (98304 GB) for Tianhe-1, 262 TB for Tianhe-1A |
| Speed | Tianhe-1: 563teraFLOPS (Rmax) 1,206.2teraFLOPS (Rpeak), Tianhe-1A: 2,566.0teraFLOPS (Rmax) 4,701.0teraFLOPS (Rpeak) |
| Ranking | TOP500: 1st, November 2010 (Tianhe-1A)[2] |
| Purpose | Petroleum exploration, aircraft simulation |
| Sources | top500.org |
| Tianhe-1 | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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, orTH-1 (Chinese:天河一号,[tʰjɛ́nxɤ̌ íxâʊ];Sky River Number One)[3] is asupercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.5petaFLOPS. Located at theNational Supercomputing Center of Tianjin,China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and was one of the fewpetascale supercomputers in the world.[4][5]
In October 2010, an upgraded version of the machine (Tianhe-1A) overtookORNL'sJaguar to become the world's fastest supercomputer, with a peak computing rate of 2.57 petaFLOPS.[6][7] In June 2011 the Tianhe-1A was overtaken by theK computer as the world's fastest supercomputer, which was also subsequently superseded.[8]
Both the original Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-1A use aLinux-basedoperating system.[9][10]
On 12 August 2015, Tianhe-1 felt the impact of the powerfulTianjin explosions and went offline for some time. Xinhua reports that "the office building of Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-1, one of the world's fastest supercomputers, suffered damage". Sources at Tianhe-1 told Xinhua that the computer was not damaged, but that they had shut down some of its operations as a precaution.[11] Operation resumed on 17 August 2015.[12]
Tianhe-1 was developed by theChinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) inChangsha,Hunan. It was first revealed to the public on29 October 2009, and was immediately ranked as the world's fifth fastest supercomputer in theTOP500 list released at the 2009Supercomputing Conference (SC09) held inPortland, Oregon, on16 November 2009. Tianhe achieved a speed of 563teraflops 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%.[13][14] Originally, Tianhe-1 was powered by 4,096 IntelXeon E5540 processors and 1,024 IntelXeon E5450 processors, with 5,120AMDgraphics processing units (GPUs), which were made up of 2,560 dual-GPUATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards.[15][better source needed][16]
In October 2010, Tianhe-1A, an upgraded supercomputer, was unveiled at HPC 2010 China.[17] It is now equipped with 14,336XeonX5670 processors and 7,168Nvidia Tesla M2050general purpose GPUs. 2,048FeiTeng 1000 SPARC-based processors are also installed in the system, but their computing power was not counted into the machine's officialLINPACK statistics as of October 2010.[18] Tianhe-1A has a theoretical peak performance of 4.701 petaflops.[19] 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 4.04megawatts compared to over 12 megawatts had it been built only with CPUs.[20][better source needed]
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 eightblades, 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.[21] The system has 3584 total blades containing 7168 GPUs, and 14,336 CPUs, managed by theSLURM job scheduler.[22] The total disk storage of the systems is 2Petabytes implemented as aLustre clustered file system,[3] and the total memory size of the system is 262terabytes.[18]
Another significant reason for the increased performance of the upgraded Tianhe-1A system is the Chinese-designed NUDT custom designed proprietary high-speed interconnect calledArch that runs at 160 Gbit/s, twice the bandwidth ofInfiniBand.[18]
The system also used the Chinese-madeFeiTeng-1000central processing unit.[23] The FeiTeng-1000 processor is used both on service nodes and to enhance the system interconnect.[23][24]
The supercomputer is installed at the National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin, and is used to carry out computations forpetroleum exploration andaircraft design.[14] It is an "open access" computer, meaning it provides services for other countries.[25] The supercomputer will be available to international clients.[26]
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 theTOP500 list[27][28] until July 2011 when theK computer overtook it.
In June 2011, scientists at the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) at theChinese 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 (about the same performance as 130,000 laptops).[29]
TheTianhe-1A supercomputer was shut down after theNational Supercomputing Center of Tianjin was damaged byan explosion nearby. The computer was not damaged and still remains operational.[30]
| Records | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Jaguar 1.75 petaflops | World's most powerful supercomputer October 2010 – June 2011 | Succeeded by K computer 8.2 petaflops |
