GPGPU start to take over the HPC sector: 5120 ATI GPUs deployed in China

BSN: "During the recently held nVidia GPU Technology Conference, we spoke with a lot of supercomputer vendors and learned quite an interesting number. It turns out that roughly 90% of supercomputer orders now come with at least a single GPU order [to evaluate GPU in HPC environment]. In a lot of cases, supercomputer order would contain both ATI and nVidia GPUs for a fair evaluation.

When it came to creation of Tianhe [translated into Milky Way], this supercomputer currently carries the unofficial title of world's most powerful supercomputer. Chinese National University of Defense Technology recently unveiled first PFLOPS computer outside United States of America.

Working on a budget of 600 million RMB [Yuan], which translates to 87.88 million USD, Chinese scientists created a supercomputer consisting of 24,576 Intel Core2-based cores [6144 Harpertown CPUs - 3072 Xeon E5540s and 3072 Xeon E5450s] and 5120 AMD RV770 GPUs [2560 ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB cards]. Together, 6144 Intel CPUs and 2560 AMD GPUs reach a theoretical speed of 1.206 PFLOPS."