Nvidia Owning Top Supercomputers List With GPUs

Nvidia's latest GPUs are great for playing Crysis, but there's some serious business behind those chips. The technology when applied to the Tesla products help power the world's fastest and energy-efficient supercomputers.

In terms of power, Nvidia's GPUs help accelerate work done by three of the top five supercomputers of the world.

The world's fastest, the Tianhe-1A in China, scores 2.507 PF in Linpack thanks to having 7,168 GPUs.

The third fastest, Nebulae also in China, scores 1.27 PF in Linpack thanks to having 4,640 GPUs. The fourth fastest, Tsubame 2.0 in Japan, isn't far behind with 1.192 PF with 4,200 GPUs.

While Tsubame 2.0 is only fourth in power, it's very impressive in efficiency, with a power consumption of 1.34 MW.

"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."

Of the world's greenest supercomputers, the only two in the top 10 list that broke the petaflop barrier are ones powered by Nvidia GPUs – the Tianhe-1A and the Tsubame 2.0.