Nebulae () is a

petascale Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of performing at least 1 quadrillion (10^15) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). These systems are often called petaflops systems and represent a significant leap from traditional ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

located at the National Supercomputing Center in

Shenzhen Shenzhen is a prefecture-level city in the province of Guangdong, China. A Special economic zones of China, special economic zone, it is located on the east bank of the Pearl River (China), Pearl River estuary on the central coast of Guangdong ...

Guangdong ) means "wide" or "vast", and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. The name "''Guang''" ultimately came from Guangxin ( zh, labels=no, first=t, t= , s=广信), an outpost established in Han dynasty ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. Built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

Xeon Xeon (; ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same archite ...

X5650 processors and

Nvidia Tesla Nvidia Tesla is the former name for a line of products developed by Nvidia targeted at stream processing or GPGPU, general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began us ...

C2050

GPUs A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

, it has a peak performance of 1.271

petaflops Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

using the

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 e ...

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 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

. Nebulae has a theoretical peak performance of 2.9843 petaflops. This computer is used for multiple applications requiring advanced processing capabilities. It is ranked 10th among the June 2012 list of top500.org.

See also

References

Further reading