China's Nebulae Ranks as No. 2 Supercomputer

China's Nebulae, a new supercomputer based on a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs, has achieved 1.271 PFlop/s running the Linpack benchmark, which puts it in the No. 2 spot
on the TOP500 list of supercomputers worldwide. The leading spot is retained by Jaguar, which is located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and which retains a record 1.75 petaflop/s performance running the Linpack benchmark. Jaguar has a theoretical peak capability of 2.3 petaflop/s
and nearly a quarter of a million cores. One petaflop/s refers to one quadrillion calculations per
second.


Nebulae, which is located at China's newly build National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, leverages NVidia GPU accelerators to achieve an even higher theoretical peak capability of almost 3 petaflop/s -- the highest ever on the TOP500.


The third place on the list is Los Alamos' Roadrunner, which was the first to break the petaflop/s barrier in June 2008.


The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
http://www.supercomp.dehttp://www.top500.org