China has just brought a new supercomputer online that looks like it could unseat both ORNL’s Jaguar and China’s own Nebulae machines from their rankings amongst the top of the Top500.  The new ‘Tianhe-1A’ pulls together 7,168 Tesla M2060’s with 14,336 CPU’s to delivery 2.507 Petaflops in LINPACK, for only 4 Megawatts of power.

“The performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible without GPUs,” said Guangming Liu, chief of National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. “The scientific research that is now possible with a system of this scale is almost without limits; we could not be more pleased with the results.”

While the release doesn’t state, I’m relatively certain that number is the rMax figure, meaning the Peak performance, not the sustained performance.  The current Rmax for ORNL’s Jaguar is only 2.3PetaFlop, while Nebulae clocks in an impressive 2.9Petaflops.  Either way, we shouldn’t have to wait long for the next Top500 list (probably just a week or two) and see how things shake out in the new list.

Update 10/28 9am: I just got confirmation that the 2.507 PetaFlop number is the real sustained LINPACK performance number, easily making Tianhe-1A the #1 system in relation to the last Top500 list.  Now we just have to see if Jaguar has had some upgrades in the last 6 months.  However, getting them from 1.75PF to 2.5PF would take some major upgrades.

via NVIDIA Newsroom.