Nebulae (computer) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Nebulae is a petascale

Petascale

In computing, petascale refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflop, i.e. one quadrillion floating point operations per second. The standard benchmark tool is LINPACK and Top500.org is the organisation which tracks the fastest supercomputers...

supercomputer

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

located at the National Supercomputing Center (Shenzhen)

National Supercomputing Center (Shenzhen)

The National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen houses the second fastest machine in China, and the third fastest in the world. In May 2010 the Nebulae computer in Shenzhen placed second on the Top 500 supercomputer list, after the Cray computer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in...

in Shenzhen

Shenzhen

Shenzhen is a major city in the south of Southern China's Guangdong Province, situated immediately north of Hong Kong. The area became China's first—and one of the most successful—Special Economic Zones...

, Guangdong

Guangdong

Guangdong is a province on the South China Sea coast of the People's Republic of China. The province was previously often written with the alternative English name Kwangtung Province...

, China

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

. Built from a Dawning

Dawning Information Industry

Dawning Information Industry is a supercomputer manufacturer in the People's Republic of China. Its Dawning 4000A and Dawning 5000A clusters were both ranked tenth in June 2004 and November 2008 TOP500 lists respectively...

TC3600 Blade system with Intel

Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...

Xeon

The Xeon is a brand of multiprocessing- or multi-socket-capable x86 microprocessors from Intel Corporation targeted at the non-consumer server, workstation and embedded system markets.-Overview:...

X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla

Nvidia Tesla

The Tesla graphics processing unit is nVidia's third brand of GPUs. It is based on high-end GPUs from the G80 , as well as the Quadro lineup. Tesla is nVidia's first dedicated General Purpose GPU...

C2050 GPUs

Graphics processing unit

A graphics processing unit or GPU is a specialized circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display...

, it has a peak performance of 1.271 petaflops using the LINPACK

LINPACK

LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and early 1980s...

benchmark suite. Nebulae was ranked the second most powerful computer in the world in the June 2010 list of the fastest supercomputers according to TOP500

TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...

. Nebulae has a theoretical peak performance of 2.9843 petaflops. It is currently the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world and China's second most powerful.

See also

Further reading