Tianhe-1A, which is installed at China's National Supercomputer Center, located in Tianjin.
©Nvidia
China's electronic pride and joy, Tianhe-1A, was the fastest supercomputer in the world in 2010. It slipped to second place in 2011 and now sits in the number five spot. Like the Nebulae, Tianhe-1A's performance is bolstered by graphics card maker Nvidia. It uses 168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs to offload work from its 14,336 Intel Xeon processors. In total, it runs on more than 180,000 computer cores [source: CNET].
Unlike Nebulae, Tianhe-1A is not made by Chinese computer company Dawning. Instead, it comes from China's National University of Defense Technology. It operates at the National Supercomputing Center at Tianjin. Tianhe-1A can crank out 2.5 petaflops of performance, making it twice as fast as China's next-best supercomputer.
