Tianhe-1

Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 (, tian1he2-yi1hao4; Sky River Number One) is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and was one of the few petascale supercomputers in the world. In October 2010, an upgraded version of the machine (Tianhe-1A) overtook ORNL's Jaguar to become the world's fastest supercomputer, with a peak computing rate of 2.57 petaFLOPS. In June 2011 the Tianhe-1A was overtaken by the K computer as the world's fastest supercomputer, which was also subsequently superseded. Both the original Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-1A use a Linux-based operating system. On 12 August 2015, Tianhe-1 felt the impact of the powerful Tianjin 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. Operation resumed on 17 August 2015. Tianhe-1 was developed by the Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Changsha, Hunan. It was first revealed to the public on 29 October 2009, and was immediately ranked as the world's fifth fastest supercomputer in the TOP500 list released at the 2009 Supercomputing Conference (SC09) held in Portland, Oregon, on 16 November 2009. Tianhe achieved a speed of 563 teraflops 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%. Originally, Tianhe-1 was powered by 4,096 Intel Xeon E5540 processors and 1,024 Intel Xeon E5450 processors, with 5,120 AMD graphics processing units (GPUs), which were made up of 2,560 dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards. In October 2010, Tianhe-1A, an upgraded supercomputer, was unveiled at HPC 2010 China. It is now equipped with 14,336 Xeon X5670 processors and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 general purpose GPUs.