Analysis of the Applicability of Tianhe-1 Supercomputer in the Field of Meteorology

The world has entered an era of petaFlops computing. Tianhe-1A supercomputer located at the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin, China, was developed by Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), and ranked No.1 in the world's fastest computers of A Top 500 list issued on Nov.14, 2010 in the United States.Tianhe-1A supercomputer employs a heterogeneous architecture by integrating CPUs with GPUs, and its theoretical peak performance is 4.701 petaFlops, its LINPACK test performance being 2.507 petaFlops. The paper introduces systematic structure, hardware and software systems of Tianhe-1A. The applicability of Tianhe-1A in the meteorological fi eld is also discussed.