This week brings two major pieces of news for NVIDIA, both of which are evidence that the GPU maker is killin’ it in the high-performance computing (HPC) space. First is the latest Top 500 Supercomputer List, which sees China’s NVIDIA-powered Tianhe-1A vault past the US Department of Energy’s Jaguar machine to the top of the list.

China’s 2.57-petaflop beast is powered by a combination of Intel Xeon (Westmere-EP) CPUs and over 7,000 NVIDIA GPUs. It runs Linux, and uses a proprietary interconnect to glue the nodes together. The DOE’s Opteron-based Jaguar isn’t too far behind, though, at 2.33 petaflops; if the DOE added GPU coprocessors to the system, it could easily retake the top spot. The Chinese also hold the number 3 spot on the list, with another Westmere-EP-based system that uses an earlier version of NVIDIA’s Tesla for a coprocessor. Japan comes in fourth with another Westmere-EP/NVIDIA combo, followed by another GPU-less, Opteron-based Cray system at the DOE.

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From China to Amazon, NVIDIA’s Tesla is on a roll