A few days ago, Inspur, China’s leading server manufacturer, held a news conference in Beijing and officially launched “Yitian”, the first tera-scale desktop super computer in the industry, with the price of only￥50,000 yuan. Wang Endong, senior vice president of Inspur Group, Zhang Jianzhong, general manager of NVIDIA in China as well as computer experts and users attended the conference. The birth of Inspur “Yitian” symbolizes that China has reached the international leading level in desktop super computer field, and it will greatly ease the tense situation of high-performance computing resources, effectively improve grass-roots scientific research level and promote China’s scientific research computing to easily enter the “universal tera-scale era”.

Wang Endong senior vice president of Inspur Group	Zhang Jianzhong general manager of NVIDIA in China
Prof. Yu Jun Deputy director of Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences	Prof. Yang Guangwen 863 program expert, director of HPC, Tsinghua University

It is reported that “Yitian” is an important R&D result of “Inspur High-performance Server and Memory Technology National Key Laboratory”. Its peak value computing ability can reach 4T Flop/s, equal to that of 40 servers or 200 PCs. Its volume is similar to that of ordinary computers, but with cost only as one fifth of conventional high-performance computing systems.

 “Inspur ‘Yitian’ breaks the original idea of high-performance cluster, adopts collaborative accelerating framework, doubles the speed of stand-alone computer performance, while the sharp drop in the cost effectively solves the cost, volume, power consumption and deployment problems faced by users when applying traditional high-performance clusters, greatly enhancing the competitiveness of national scientific research. Meanwhile, Inspur successfully creates the segment market of desktop super computer and increases the initial level of this area above teraflops,” said Wang Endong, senior vice president of Inspur Group. “More importantly, the birth of ‘Yitian’ marks that Inspur’s high-performance strategy enters a new stage. Focusing on the innovative collaborative accelerating framework, we Inspur will spare no efforts to increase the transportation and development of high-performance application software, and provide users with a ‘good and affordable’ platform, which is the top priority of Inspur high-performance development.”

“GPU has a huge inherent parallel computation capability. As the inventor of GPU, NVIDIA has extended the capability to high-performance computing field and developed Tesla, laying the foundation for personal super computers. We are very happy to cooperate with Inspur and together release the tera-scale desktop super computer, which will provide higher performance for Chinese users with a more reasonable price and a much lower energy cost.” said Zhang Jianzhong, General Manager of NVIDIA in China.

New products show at the conference	Sand painting theme show (click to watch video)

For users, the emergence of Inspur “Yitian” renders the application of high-performance computing no more an extravagant hope. Some data show that mainly high-performance clusters with less than 64 nodes and about 4 T Flop/s computing speed account for 75% requirements in the whole high-performance computing market. However, the prices of above-mentioned clusters range from 100 thousand to several million RMB. For many grass-roots scientific research institutes, enterprise R&D centers, and even individuals, in spite of application demands, they cannot afford the expensive cluster equipments, which results in the backward innovation abilities and deficient competitiveness of relevant fields in China. Inspur “Yitian” with a low cost and high-performance has broad application prospects in medical imaging, molecular dynamics, gene comparison, financial simulation, animation rendering, film editing and new material development and makes users in these fields really able to possess tera-scale high-performance devices. It is essential to break the bottleneck of high-performance applications, enhance enterprise innovation ability and improve productivity.  

The emergence of Inspur “Yitian” tera-scale desktop super computer not only lowers the threshold of high-performance computing field, which enables every scientific institute with demands to afford and use it, but also helps our country’s high-performance industry gradually walk out of the project-customized “ivory tower” and wins broader development space, finally promoting the optimization and upgrading of the whole high-performance industrial structure. More importantly, with the wide application of high-performance computing in every field such as production and scientific research, it will change people’s concept fundamentally and people will be habituated to improving scientific research and innovation productivity with tera-scale super computing.

Hu Leijun, Inspur server technical director and Liu Jun, general manager of high-performance server product department receive media interview	News Conference

About NVIDIA®

NVIDIA® (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the leader of global visual computing technologies and the inventor of GPU (graphic processing unit). The high-performance processor GPU (graphics processing unit) can generate stunning interactive graphics on workstations, PCs, game machines and mobile devices. Products of NVIDIA® include GeForce® products targeting entertainment and consumer market, Quadro® products in the service specialty design and visualization area and Tesla™ products able to achieve high-performance computing. The headquarters of NVIDIA™ is located in Santa Clara, California, USA and it sets up many branches in Asia, Europe and the Americas. For more information, please log on www.nvidia.cn.