Chapter 1. Introducing OpenCL
This chapter covers
In October 2010, a revolution took place in the world of high-performance computing. The Tianhe-1A, constructed by China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, came from total obscurity to seize the leading position among the world’s best performing supercomputers. With a maximum recorded computing speed of 2,566 TFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second), it performs nearly 50 percent faster than the second-place finisher, Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer. Table 1.1 lists the top three supercomputers.
Table 1.1. Top three supercomputers of 2010 (source: www.top500.org)
| Supercomputer |
Max speed (TFLOPS) |
Processors |
Power (kW) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tianhe-1A | 2,566 | 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs, 7,168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs | 4040.00 |
| Jaguar | 1,759 | 224,256 AMD Opteron CPUs | 6950.60 |
| Nebulae | 1,271 | 9,280 Intel Xeon CPUs, 4,640 Nvidia Tesla GPUs | 2580.00 |
What’s so revolutionary is the presence of GPUs (graphics processing units) in both the Tianhe-1A and Nebulae? In 2009, none of the top three supercomputers had GPUs, and only one system in the top 20 had any GPUs at all. As the table makes clear, the two systems with GPUs provide not only excellent performance, but also impressive power efficiency.