Nvidia has a press announcement regarding World's Fastest Super Computer.
NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Power World's Fastest Supercomputer
Half the Size, Lower Power and 50% Faster Than World's Top Supercomputer
The Tianhe-1A Supercomputer, located at National Supercomputer Center, TianjinSANTA CLARA, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 10/28/2010 -- Tianhe-1A, a new supercomputer revealed today at HPC 2010 China, has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today(1).
Tianhe-1A epitomizes modern heterogeneous computing by coupling massively parallel GPUs with multi-core CPUs, enabling significant achievements in performance, size and power. The system uses 7,168 NVIDIA® Tesla™ M2050 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs; it would require more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone.
One of the points in the press release is the power comparison of a an all CPU vs. the Hybrid CPU/GPU solution.
More importantly, a 2.507 petaflop system built entirely with CPUs would consume more than 12 megawatts. Thanks to the use of GPUs in a heterogeneous computing environment, Tianhe-1A consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it 3 times more power efficient -- the difference in power consumption is enough to provide electricity to over 5000 homes for a year.
