The fastest supercomputer in the world capable of a maximum processing power of 2.51 Peta FLOPS measured Linpack, sees the use of GPUs alongside traditional processors, following in this a trend that is becoming increasingly popular. Tianhe-1A is the name of the new supercomputer, was recently installed at the National University of Defense Technology of Tianjin, China, including 14,336 Intel Xeon processors and NVIDIA Tesla M2050 7168 video cards, each with GPU GF100 family Fermi.


At present, this new supercomputer is the top of the Top 500 that collects the most powerful solutions in the world, the updated list will be made public on 13 November at SC in 2010. In 2009, the National University of Defense Technology of Tianjin had put into operation a hybrid supercomputer, equipped with Intel Xeon processors to 45 nanometers in combination with ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, each equipped with two RV770 GPU family. In that case the maximum power reached was equal to 563 TeraFLOPS, obtained by combining 7168 GPU with 14,336 processors.