Chinese boffins have installed one of the most powerful supercomputers ever designed in a research facility in Shenzen.

The Nebulae system is comprised from a shedload of Dawning Information Industry TC3600 blade computers and it is already ranked the second fastest computer on the planet. It apparently delivers 1.271 petaflops per second, which is still somewhat lower than the US Department of Energy's Jaguar, which is installed at the Oak Ridge nuke lab.

However, the Nebulae is powered by a combination of Intel X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 boards, with a total of 4,640 Tesla parts. Thanks to the use of Tesla chips, the Nebulae is also quite a bit more power efficient than the Jaguar. It consumes 2.55MW of power compared to Jaguar's 7MW. The use of GPUs alongside CPUs should also allow for a bit more flexibility and it has a higher peak performance than the Jaguar. Interestingly, Jaguar is based on AMD six-cores and its peak performance is 2.3 petaflops per second, while the Nebulae could deliver 2.98 petaflops.

Interestingly, the company behind the Nebulae announced that it would use China's indigenous 16-core Loongson 3 processors in upcoming supercomputers.

More here.