China's new supercomputer

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mr friendly guy
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China's new supercomputer

Post by mr friendly guy »

http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-makes ... 1466403960
China Makes New Supercomputing Gains
For first time, China places more machines than the U.S. on Top500 list

By DON CLARK in San Francisco and EVA DOU in Beijing
June 20, 2016 2:26 a.m. ET
4 COMMENTS
China has bolstered its claim to leadership in the highest reaches of computing with a world-beating system that was built with homegrown processor chips.

A massive machine in the city of Wuxi grabbed the top spot in a twice-yearly ranking of the 500 fastest scientific computers, offering more than twice the performance of another Chinese system that has led the list for three years. The supercomputer’s test performance is roughly five times faster than the leading U.S. system, which now ranks third.

Sunway TaihuLight, as the new machine is called, marks the first time China has taken the top speed ranking without using U.S. semiconductor technology. The prior No. 1 system used chips from Intel Corp., which was prevented from sending chips to upgrade the system by a U.S. export ban last year.

In another sign of its heavy investments in the field, China for the first time placed more machines than the U.S. on the so-called Top500 list, by 167 to 165.

Both developments, expected to be announced at a supercomputer conference opening on Monday in Germany, underscore the waning U.S. dominance of technology considered crucial for science and national defense. Supercomputers have long been used by governments for cracking codes and nuclear weapons development, as well as for civilian uses like climate forecasting, oil exploration and designing products such as cars and drugs.


The U.S. Department of Energy allocated $525 million to help build three faster supercomputers at U.S. national labs. The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, is close to completing legislation designed to restore supercomputer leadership by 2023.

But the first U.S. system in the speed class of the Sunway TaihuLight won’t be operating until 2018, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist whose report on the Chinese system is set to be released Monday.

China has “strongly pulled ahead in the race,” said Horst Simon, deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a major supercomputer user that helps assemble the Top500 list. “The fact that every single piece is Chinese-made is huge.”


U.S. concerns about Chinese competition emerged in 2010, when a system called Tianhe-1 briefly grabbed first place on the list. A follow-on system called Tianhe-2, which became No. 1 in 2013, rated about 34 quadrillion calculations per second—petaflops in industry parlance—on a set of standard tests. Sunway TaihuLight reached 93 petaflops on the same tests and has a theoretical top speed of 125.4 petaflops, Mr. Dongarra said.

The system emerges as China has been trying to reduce its reliance on U.S.-made chips amid national security concerns in both countries. The Department of Commerce last year denied Intel’s request to export chips to four centers associated with Tianhe-2, alleging links to “nuclear explosive activities.” Chinese officials denied those charges and have used locally made chips to upgrade the system.

Officials at National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology, which developed Sunway TaihuLight, told Mr. Dongarra the machine is expected to be used in fields such as manufacturing, life sciences, computer-aided engineering, weather forecasting and modeling other earth systems.

Its processors come from the Shanghai High Performance IC Center, a state-owned company founded in 2003 that also produced chips for a system called Sunway Bluelight that attracted attention in 2011. Sunway TaihuLight, which is unusually energy-efficient as well as powerful, is a more significant accomplishment, Mr. Dongarra said.

The system comprises nearly 41,000 chips—each with 260 small calculating engines called processor cores—allowing designers to pack 10.65 million cores into 40 cabinets, he said. That compares to about 560,000 cores in the fastest U.S. supercomputer.

Peter Ungaro, chief executive of Seattle-based computer maker Cray Inc., called it an impressive machine. “We know that building a system of this size and complexity is no small task,” he said.

Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, is home to one of the country’s six supercomputing centers. It was funded by the so-called “863 program,” a central government plan to develop self-sufficiency in technologies deemed critical for national security and economic development.

The computer’s name is derived from that of a large freshwater lake that borders Wuxi. Sunway, which means “Divine Strength” or “Magical Strength,” also is a pun on the fact the chips inside them in Chinese are pronounced “Shenwei,” which means “Shanghai Strength” using an archaic term for Shanghai.

Intel, meanwhile, is using the conference in Frankfurt called ISC High Performance to unveil a new member of a chip line called Xeon Phi that is specifically designed for scientific calculations. Rival Nvidia Corp. is introducing the Tesla P100, which is designed to accelerate computing chores in systems that also use Intel chips.

Both companies hope to benefit as scientists begin to use supercomputers for analytical tasks associated with a technique called deep learning, in addition to traditional jobs like simulating natural phenomena. “We believe this dynamic will change how computers are created,” said Ian Buck, Nvidia’s vice president of accelerated computing.
I remember when Tianhe took the top spot a few years ago and people were saying, yeah the connecting parts are Chinese, but the chips are American. Come back when they use their own chips.

Well they just did.

Link to the top 500 list

http://www.top500.org/lists/2016/06/
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K. A. Pital
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Re: China's new supercomputer

Post by K. A. Pital »

Banning high-tech exports to China just makes them develop their own solutions. Trying to hinder their development by such bans is just idiotic.

On the other hand, China has already demonstrated the capabilities to retain and further develop advanced technology that was originally created elsewhere, so this does not come as a surprise.

Now they just need to build more stuff than the US every year and eventually send them to the dust bin of history, restoring Asia's rightful position as the manufacturing center of the world that creates a volume of products proportional to its population, and not otherwise.
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Re: China's new supercomputer

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Yeah. If anything, encouraging reliance on US technology at the high end might have wound up being to the US's advantage- look at what getting to copy the IBM 360 did to the Soviet computer industry.
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Re: China's new supercomputer

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http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/06/20/ ... rcomputer/

Apparently it runs at 6 Gflops / watt. Its supercomputer rivals from China, the US and Japan runs at around 2 Gflops /watt. It does have a drawback using it like this, but still the article notes the computer can still do amazing things despite cost they used to make it this efficient.

Going on, from what I understand, in terms of super computing, the limitation isn't space, its power. Because unless you're a ridiculously small country, you can just stack more and more chips in to get more power, although you would need to have some good connecting hardware. The limitation is power, because just stacking more and more chips in, isn't just a matter of adding more power to supply the chips. The high energy use would generate heat, which in turn will require cooling systems and more energy, and even in China energy isn't necessarily cheap. So having such efficiency has some advantages at least with super computing.

So its clearly quite different design from intel stuff. Of course having quite a different design would do nothing to shut up China bashers who think China never invents anything, ie Joe Biden and a large chunks of spacebattles. :D
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Re: China's new supercomputer

Post by Ace Pace »

Looking at your link, I'm far less impressed than I was originally. To hit the rather useless metric of GFLOPs, they seem to have taken a huge hit on memory performance. This is nice and an important PoC for the chinese fab industry, but it's not unholy shit 3 times as good performance as the title makes it out to be.
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