Nebulae, made by Chinese supercomputer manufacturer Dawning, has been in the top 10 of the TOP500 list since June 2010. The computer has slid from a strong starting rank of No. 2 down to No. 10, but being the tenth most powerful computer in the world is still pretty good, right? With only 120,000 Intel Xeon computer cores, the Nebulae performs at more than 1.27 petaflops and is the second most powerful computer in China.
Nebulae operates at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen. Part of its speed comes from a number of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) that help accelerate performance. Nvidia's GPUs also helped China's Tianhe-1A, currently in fifth place, to best many other super-powerful computers.
Like most supercomputers, Nebulae is tasked with doing what it does best: performing calculations very, very quickly. Its time is reportedly divided between high speed calculations and cloud calculations [source: What's On Shenzen].
