What are Supercomputers made of!!

There is a list of top supercomputers maintained here. This is updated twice a year and the latest update happened recently on the 28th May 2010. What is interesting is not the top spot. That is still held by Cray Jaguar  supercomputer. It is able to perform at 1.75 petaflops/s on the Linpack benchmark and is capable of a theoretical maximum rate of  2.3 petaflops/s.

There's a new entry on this list and that goes directly to no.2 spot. A Chinese system named nebulae that performs at 1.271 petaflops/s on Linpack and a possible theoretical performance of 3 petaflops/s that surpasses the Jaguar too.

This is built of the silicon wonders, commercially available microprocessor chips that we admire here at this site. The Nebulae is built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. The use of graphic accelerator chips or GPUs are becoming increasingly common in high performance systems.