Three of the World's Top Five Supercomputers Powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs

GPU Supercomputers Make Their Mark in Supercomputer World Rankings

SC10 -- The November 2010 list of the "Top500" fastest supercomputers in the world was released today on https://www.top500.org/ and it revealed that NVIDIA Tesla^TM GPUs are now powering three of the top five systems.

Tesla GPUs were featured in the number one, three and four slots with the recently announced Tianhe-1A system taking the top spot with a performance record of 2.507 petaflops. The five highest-ranked systems were as follows (GPU-enabled systems in green):

  Rank      Name     Location  Linpack Perf.  # of GPUs  Power Consumption
    1   Tianhe-1A    China     2.507 PF       7168       4.04 MW         
    2   Jaguar       USA       1.75 PF        n/a        6.95 MW         
    3   Nebulae      China     1.27 PF        4640       2.55 MW         
    4   Tsubame 2.0  Japan     1.192 PF       4200       1.340 MW        
    5   Hopper       USA       1.05 PF        n/a        2.93 MW

The top three GPU supercomputers deliver more performance than the rest of the Top 10 systems combined. The most notable new entry to the Top500 is Tsubame 2.0, the new supercomputer from Tokyo Institute of Technology. The system delivers petaflop-class performance while remaining extremely efficient, consuming just 1.340 megawatts, dramatically less power than any other system on the top five.

"Tsubame 2.0 is an impressive achievement, balancing performance and power to deliver the most energy efficient petaflop-class supercomputer ever built," said Bill Dally, chief scientist at NVIDIA. "The path to exascale computing will be forged by groundbreaking systems like Tsubame 2.0."

GPUs have quickly become the enabling technology behind the world's top supercomputers. They contain hundreds of parallel processor cores capable of dividing up large computational workloads and processing them simultaneously, significantly increasing system performance. Heterogeneous systems, built with GPUs and CPUs, require less space and consume less power, making supercomputing more affordable and more accessible than ever before.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from tablets and portable media players to notebooks and workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. The company holds more than 1,600 U.S. patents, including ones covering designs and insights which are essential to modern computing. For more information, see https://www.nvidia.com/.

Related Articles:

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Benchmark Performance