Supercomputers/Systems/Tianhe-1
China · upgraded · hpc
Tianhe-1
Operated by National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin at National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 563.10 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 1.21 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 46.7%
- Cores
- 71,680
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - NUDT TH-1 Cluster | NUDT | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Accelerator | ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Accelerators 55 nm · 286 W 2,560 dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards, 5,120 GPUs total | AMD | 2,560 reported | Reported | top500.orgen.wikipedia.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5540 CPUs x86-64 · 4C · 2.53 GHz · 45 nm · 80 W 4,096 Intel Xeon E5540 2.53GHz quad-core processors | Intel | 4,096 reported | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E5450 CPUs x86-64 · 4C · 3 GHz · 45 nm · 120 W 1,024 Intel Xeon E5450 3.0GHz quad-core processors | Intel | 1,024 reported | Reported | top500.org |
The read
NUDT's hybrid Xeon and ATI Radeon system at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, fifth on the November 2009 TOP500 at 563.1 TFlop/s Rmax and the first Chinese system to place inside the world's top five. It combined 4,096 Intel Xeon E5540 and 1,024 Xeon E5450 host processors with ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 GPU cards over InfiniBand DDR; no source we fetched names the InfiniBand switch vendor, so no interconnect edge is recorded. NUDT rebuilt the machine a year later around its own Arch interconnect and NVIDIA GPUs as Tianhe-1A, already in this dataset as a separate row; this row is the original 2009 configuration. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin
- Location
- Tianjin, China
- Cooling
- Air cooling
- Commissioned
- 2010
Change history
- 2026-09-24 Added; the original 2009 system, distinct from the already-present Tianhe-1A
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| en.wikipedia.org | names system, part and count | Intel Xeon E5540, Intel Xeon E5450 · counts: 4096, 1024, 2560 |
| top500.org | names system and part | Intel Xeon E5540, Intel Xeon E5450 |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.