The National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin () is a supercomputing facility located at the National Defense Science and Technology University in
Tianjin
Tianjin is a direct-administered municipality in North China, northern China on the shore of the Bohai Sea. It is one of the National Central City, nine national central cities, with a total population of 13,866,009 inhabitants at the time of the ...
,
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 ...
. One of the fastest
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 ...
s in the world (see "The
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 ...
Project" list of supercomputers),
Tianhe-1A
Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 (, ; '' Sky River Number One'') is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world fr ...
, is located at the facility.
History
The Tianjin Computer Institute had been active as far back as 1984 and had developed the 16-bit TQ-0671
microcomputer
A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (P ...
system. As the National Supercomputing Center, the facilities came under the direction (purview) of the National Supercomputing Center council, consisting of members of the National Defense Science and Technology University, the various departments of the
Tianjin Economic and Technological Development Zone, and the Tianjin Binhai New Area Administrative Committee.
The facilities have been used by various people through the Beijing and Tianjin area.
The center was built with the purpose of encouraging and initiating technological development and scientific innovation in the
Tianjin Binhai New Area. Plans include both commercial and military interests.
It was built to fulfill three primary objectives:
A commercial affiliate of the Tianjin center had previously made the PHPC100 "personal supercomputer" in 2008 which was about twice the size of a normal desktop computer, but had 40 times the speed. In 2010 a second generation model was released.
On August 12, 2015, the center was forced to shut down for a time (it was still offline as of August 14) due to widespread infrastructural damage, along with related security concerns, incurred as a result of the
2015 Tianjin port disaster.
Tianhe-1A
In October 2010, Tianhe-1A, a separate supercomputer, was unveiled at HPC 2010 China. It is now equipped with 14,336
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 ...
X5670 processors and 7,168
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 ...
M2050 general purpose GPUs. 2,048
NUDT FT1000 heterogeneous processors are also installed in the system, but their computing power was not counted into the machine's official
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 ...
statistics as of October 2010.
Tianhe-1A has a theoretical peak performance of 4.701 petaflops.
It is used to carry out computations for
petroleum exploration
Hydrocarbon exploration (or oil and gas exploration) is the search by petroleum geologists and geophysicists for hydrocarbon deposits, particularly petroleum and natural gas, in the Earth's crust using petroleum geology.
Exploration methods
V ...
and
aircraft simulation.
It is an "open access" computer meaning it provides services for other countries.
Tianhe-2
See also
*
Supercomputer centers in China
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin
Supercomputer sites
Computer science institutes in China
Buildings and structures in Tianjin
Science and technology in China
1984 establishments in China
Supercomputing in China
1984 in Tianjin