Tianhe (Milky Way) is the name of the running in the People's Republic of China supercomputer, which according to state news agency Xinhua, the power reaches a petaflops. The maximum processing speed of the system (peak performance) is 1.206 petaflopses; a whole is a hybrid consisting of the Intel 6144 processor and 5120 graphics processors from AMD. Tianhe has been installed at the National University of Defense Technology (National University of Defense Technology, NUDT) in Changsha - the capital of Hunan province.

In fact, however, declared the power of one petaflops is the theoretical value. According to the rules determining the ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers (TOP500) system can not be counted among the petaflops machine, because the Linpack benchmark result reached 563.1 Teraflop per second. Linpack requires a large cache, which have only a conventional CPU. Tianhe exceeds the instantaneous value of one petaflops mainly due to GPUs, which act as a coprocessor (GPGPU).

In the near future supercomputer installed in the Intel processors are to be supplemented or replaced by a CPU built by the Chinese. If you believe what Professor Zhou Xingminga of NUDT, result in the Linpack benchmark exceeds 800 teraflopses.

Installation cost 600 million yuan (about 88 million dollars).