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China Builds 1-Petaflop Homegrown Supercomputer
MrSeb writes "Drawing yet another battle line between the incumbent oligarchs of the West and the developing hordes of the East, China has unveiled a new supercomputer that uses entirely-homegrown processors — 8,704 of them, to be exact. The computer is called Sunway BlueLight MPP and it has a peak performance of just over 1 petaflop — or around the 15th fastest supercomputer in the world. Sunway uses the ShenWei SW-3 1600, a 16-core, 64-bit MIPS-compatible (RISC) CPU. The process used to make the chips is not known, but it is likely 65 or 45nm, a few generations behind Intel's latest and greatest. Each of the 139,264 cores runs at 1.1GHz, the entire system has 150TB of memory and 2PB of storage, and of course it's water-cooled. The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China — as in, the country itself — probably reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha CPU in 2001 and has been developing ever since. Sunway is significant for two reasons: a) It's very low-power; it consumes just one megawatt, about half of its contemporaries and one seventh of the US's Jaguar — and b) This is China's first significant supercomputer to be built without Intel or AMD processors."
The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China — as in, the country itself — has been steadily developing since 2001. It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU.
So you're saying that the entirely homegrown processor was started by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU? Sounds very telling of China's position on innovation (copy/paste). I'm very excited someone is putting pressure on the nations of the world to compute like a boss but it does rub me the wrong way when the title of the article is titled with a "West vs. East" prefix. I'm not trying to get all "Rah Rah USA" here but isn't all the fabrication and chip design built on top of so much history from all around the world? Calling anything entirely "homegrown" in supercomputers or chip design seems kind of unbelievable to me. Unless China's got something radically original, I'm guessing they owe at least a little credit to so much work done in the USA, Europe the rest of Asia. I mean, it is RISC, right?
This "East vs. West" and "homegrown" stuff is kind of misleading and I find this amusing:
Lest you think this is merely serendipitous happenstance, think again: China has repeatedly stated that it wishes to sever its reliance on American/Western high-tech — and now it can add supercomputers to its rapidly growing list of (mostly reverse-engineered) successes.
And when that is deemed "too slow" where do you turn to move forward? Do you draw on your internal innovation to come up with a new design and process to defeat your opponents or do you merely go back to re-engineering your opponent's latest chip?
Very soon, perhaps by 2020, the only edge that the US will have is in the realm of research and innovation ...
Reverse engineering is innovation? Okay so when China outstrips the United States and defeats the evil Western corporations, who then will they turn to for reverse engineering targets? Also, what is driving this chip to innovate? Who are the competitors for Loongson/Godson? Nobody inside their borders, the government is funding that! That's the problem when your government pays for and decides what you're going to use. Once that's in place, you can sit back and soak up that fat federal funding. Where's the competition going to come from?
Hey man, I love FUD if it kicks our politicians into dumping more of that Military Industrial Complex cash into Science and Research but ... feel free to call me skeptical of your last conclusion. The fact is that by 2020 they're still going to be using this same reverse engineered chip design -- unless they're on their way to reverse engineering another.
My work here is dung.
Why would Loongson/Godson be reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha? It implements the MIPS instruction set, not Alpha. Wouldn't it have been easier for them to reverse-engineer a MIPS chip? Doesn't the evidence seem to indicate that it's a genuinely independent implementation of MIPS?
The only source of this speculation I have found is just the extremetech article that has been linked to. My googling is showing nothing else to back this up.
It's either MIPS 64, or Alpha architecture, it isn't both. Alpha would have been reverse Engineered, but MIPS would be more likely give that it's well documented in Hennessey and Patterson, which is probably the most commonly used text on processor architecture.
If I were them, I'd one of the OpenSPARC cores.
You a verb there.
From wikipedia:
In 2007, a deal was reached by MIPS Technologies and ICT. STMicroelectronics bought a MIPS license for Loongson, and thus the processor can be promoted as MIPS-based or MIPS-compatible instead of MIPS-like.
In June 2009, ICT licenced the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures directly from MIPS Technologies.
In August 2011, Loongson Technology Corp. Ltd. licensed the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures from MIPS Technologies, Inc. for continued development of MIPS-based Loongson CPU cores.
Yet another FUD article trolling for xenophobic reactions.
>It's the truth, no matter how far you modbomb.
You get modbombed because you don't bring anything to the discussion except "hate china" and your ideas are lame. Supply them with faulty technology like you suggested in a previous message? Dude, they can get the latest processors off the shelf. And it's not like they don't have fabs for making their own. We gave it to them, willingly.
So if you have anything to say bad about anybody, maybe you should look at US businesses, who in their greed for short term gains, decided to hand the Chinese everything they wanted.
I don't fault the Chinese for anything they do now. I do fault US boards and CEOs for fucking everyone here for a quick buck.
So yeah, you get modbombed because you're not contributing.
Have a nice day.
--
BMO
reverse engineered
Licensed from MIPS.
DEC Alpha CPU
Loongson is MIPS-compatible.
in 2001
The company that makes Loongson was founded in 2002.
Wow, almost every single word in that clause is wrong.
The rise of the West in the last few hundred years can been attributed to the Renaissance
The Renaissance happened partly/mostly due to a bunch of Italians rediscovering ancient Greek and Roman knowledge. Ergo, the West as we know it got to where it is by copying the Greeks/Romans
But of course, it's also around the time of Renaissance that the modern notion copyright and intellectual property surfaced.
Thus, we have the doublethink that makes it OK for the West to copy ancient Greeks/Romans, but not OK for other cultures to copy the West.
However, outside of ethics, isn't it illegal to copy a copyrighted design?
I haven't read China's copyright law, but at least in my home country, exclusive rights in chip designs expire after ten years, unlike other exclusive rights under copyright law. Even the chip's patents last longer than those.
anyhow. the west can just start copying and reverse engineering china if it goes to that.
in either case, it's better tech for everyone.
also - one important points in kicking off the renaissance was this: stealing shit from CHINA.
gunpowder? check.
advanced principles on war and administration? check.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Nope. Not gonna blame China.
I blame Texas Instruments and others. I blame TI for closing their Attleboro MA plant and shipping everything off, including the engineering, to China.
Then there was AT Cross. Back when you wanted a "fancy pen" in the 70s and 80s, you bought a Cross pen. What did AT Cross do? Pick up and ship everything off to China from Lincoln RI. No, it's not high tech, but the thinking is the same.
Those are just local examples I can think of off the top of my head.
Not blaming China anymore. I blame US.
--
BMO
that is why china's supercomputer has a turbo button on it.
He said "subtly defective" not "Batshit insane"
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"I don't fault the Chinese for anything they do now."
Thing is, while Americans are waking up to the misdeeds done unto them, China still gets away with "fucking everyone" to help their economy -- socialized health care is long gone, unions are merely a facade, and minimum wage is 1000 yuan a month in cities where average rent is 1500+, in their places are entirely government funded start-ups put into private hands, rising tax rebates for export companies to offset increasing foreign tariffs, and crackdowns where stories like Scott Olsen's are so myriad that society is numb to them.
It is the same story as in the US of taking money from private citizens to fund the captains of industry and their economic war machines, only to an even greater degree for the sake of helping China catch up. The sad fact we've come to realize is that the country that can more easily oppress can also more easily tip the economic scales in their favor. Yet there are those like you who would, in their dissatisfaction with the old bullies, pave the way and make excuses for the new ones.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Not DEC, seemingly, but COMPAQ via Tru64 on Alpha. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tru64_UNIX "A Chinese version of Tru64 UNIX named COSIX was jointly developed by Compaq and China National Computer Software & Technology Service Corporation (CS&S)[10]. It was released in 1999."
Why is the gut american reaction "Look at those dirty Chinese copying our technology, they're just stupid copycats"
Why don't we instead think "Man, look how quickly they innovate on technology because they aren't locked down by stupid IP law, we should fix our IP law to help innovators (help them not fear being sued to death for improving a product and making a buck and some jobs)"
The fact of the matter is, if we don't "steal" IP (and by steal I mean share and protect inventors and innovators in a reasonable fashion, with sensible time limits and timely filings and better restrictions on what is patentable/copywriteable), some other country will, and they'll be the ones making the cash at the end of the day.
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
Disputed; the US, UK, and Germany all have credible claims.
UK and Germany, but I believe the Germans got theirs running first.
Most of the major players in WWII, and some minor ones. I believe the UK had the best system, but the US got naming rights.
Hordes of the East? Seriously?
-GiH
Loongson is a licensed MIPs implementation. Apparently early versions even made sure to clear of patent issues by not implementing a few instructions. So the accusation of being an Alpha "rip-off" is 100% wrong.