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China Successfully Developed “Milky Way One” Supercomputer

October 30th, 2009 by Sue Hardware, NEWS16 Comments

China’s National University of Defense Technology has lately unveiled the “Milky Way One” supercomputer, which is capable of one quadrillion calculations per second at its peak speed, which means China has become the world’s second nation after the United States can develop a petaflop supercomputer.


Radeon HD 4870 X2 (1GB of GDDR5 memory, 575MHz GPU clock)

Equipped with 6,144 Intel CPUs (3072 Quad-Core Xeon E5540s and 3072 Quad-Core Xeon E5450) and 5120 AMD GPUs (2560 Radeon HD 4870 X2s), Milky Way One’s peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops, and it runs at 563.1 teraflops on the Linpack benchmark.

The 155-ton system, with 103 refrigerator-like cabinets lined up on an area of about 1,000 square meters, which cost at least 600 million yuan (88.24 million U.S. dollars) is expected to process seismic data for oil exploration, conduct bio-medical computing and help design aerospace vehicles, according to NUDT president Zhang Yulin.

A single-day task for Milky Way One might take a mainstream dual-core personal computer 160 years to complete, working non-top – if it can last that long.

Zhang said the technical data of Milky Way One had been submitted to the world Top 500 list, compiled by the University of Mannheim, in Germany, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Tennessee in the United States.

The next Top 500 supercomputer list will be released in November.

Pictures courtesy of Xinhuanet

16 Responses to “China Successfully Developed “Milky Way One” Supercomputer”

  1. PSOLORD Says:
    October 30th, 2009 at 6:54 pm

    Can it run Crysis? :D

  2. strife Says:
    October 30th, 2009 at 9:16 pm

    It could run let’s say 10,000 instances of Crysis I bet lol

  3. sdfsdf Says:
    October 30th, 2009 at 9:33 pm

    why did they use ati ??
    why not use nvidia
    whats the point of using ati when u got cuda

  4. Fetazih Says:
    October 30th, 2009 at 11:27 pm

    ati have stream like nvidia have cuda, nvidia price is much higher then ati.

    4870 x2 have a price much more attractive than gtx 295.

  5. Board Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 12:34 am

    AMD > nVidia :D

  6. none Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 4:04 am

    AMDs floating point (DP) performance is about 5 to 7x higher than NVidias.
    No wonder they chose AMD since the software will be programmed especially for this “machine”.

  7. no Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 4:41 am

    finally some gpu supercomputers

  8. Aramid Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 4:43 am

    Yes, agreed with some of the posts before me. It is better to use hardware that is best suited for the job or situation with budget in mind, in this case, ATI is the one for it.

  9. CJ Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 12:44 pm

    Any benchmarks? I wonder what the score would be in 3DMark Vantage…

  10. Jim Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 9:59 pm

    When you’re splashing out £80m on a PC why not spend the extra few K’s on going nVidida :P

  11. Andy Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 11:55 pm

    @Jim, because AMD GPUs have more raw processing power, why go with a GTX295 which only manages just under 1.8TFLOPS when the 4870X2 can do 2.4TFLOPS? a 33% increase over the GTX295 for less money aswell

  12. lehpron Says:
    November 2nd, 2009 at 8:51 am

    @sdfsdf

    They used ATI because multi-socket Xeon boards are not native SLi, they are native CF, and they have been for many years, prior to AMD buying them ATI. I’m sure for many who had these system, they’ve had enough experience programming with them, than to change to nVidia (which could cost more). No the logic of ‘spending millions, what’s a few more’ doesn’t apply, these people are not using this thing for personal use; the goal is to spend as little to get the most.

  13. Someguy Says:
    November 2nd, 2009 at 9:17 am

    I bet it could run crysis at Max settings and max res at easily 1000fps…

  14. kjkm Says:
    November 2nd, 2009 at 10:46 am

    No difference on 30fps and up to 1000fps or crazies 10000fps in human eye..
    If current ati hardware can run crysis at 30+ fps with max settings (8xAA 16AF and edge detect) with max resolution it is better for smooth gameplay…

  15. rama Says:
    November 4th, 2009 at 7:54 am

    Sorry, but Are you sure that in gpu compute you use a SLI or CF??? Ha,Ha,Ha….

  16. ftsel Says:
    November 4th, 2009 at 9:16 am

    Maybe kjkm means max res for 2560X1600…
    GTX 295 Tri-SLI can’t run crysis properly at max settings for
    this res and minimum fps is very poor than ati HD4870X2..

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