Supercomputers/Systems/Tianhe-1A
China · operational · hpc
Tianhe-1A
Also known as TH-1A
Operated by National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin at National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.
Phase 1 seed dataset — under review. These rows were compiled by hand from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, and have not yet been through a second-reader verification pass. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier; treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 2.57 PFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 4.70 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 54.6%
- Cores
- 186,368
- Power
- 4.04 MW
- Per watt
- 0.6 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-1A | NUDT | — | Reported | nscc-tj.cn |
| Accelerator | NVIDIA Tesla M2050 Accelerators NVIDIA Tesla M2050 | NVIDIA | 7,168 reported | Reported | nscc-tj.cn |
| CPU | Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs Intel Xeon X5670 6C 2.93GHz | Intel | 14,336 reported | Reported | nscc-tj.cn |
| Interconnect | NUDT Arch interconnect Interconnect NUDT proprietary interconnect | NUDT | — | Reported | nscc-tj.cn |
| Operating system | Kylin Linux Operating systems Kylin Linux | KylinSoft | — | Reported | nscc-tj.cn |
The read
The first Chinese No. 1, and a system that is routinely mis-told. The compute was American — Intel Westmere CPUs and NVIDIA Fermi accelerators. The interconnect was not: NUDT's proprietary Arch fabric was domestically designed and roughly twice the bandwidth of the InfiniBand generation available at the time. Read as a supply chain rather than a spec string, Tianhe-1A is the first visible move in a substitution programme that reached the compute layer six years later. Current operational status has not been independently confirmed since its last public list appearance; we carry the last documented state rather than inferring a retirement.
Timeline
- 2009 Announced source
- 2010-11 List debut at #1 (November 2010) source
- 2010-11 First operational source
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