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China Building a 100-petaflop Supercomputer Using Domestic Processors
concealment writes "As the U.S. launched what's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops, China is building a machine that is intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015. China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), according to the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center, where the machine will be housed. Tianhe-2 could help keep China competitive with the future supercomputers of other countries, as industry experts estimate machines will start reaching 1,000-petaflop performance by 2018."
And, naturally, it's planned to use a domestically developed MIPS processor
They're using domestically built copies of MIPS processors they copied from someone else (usually wrongly), stringing them together and proving that 2+2=5.
... it runs Linux.
A domestically developed MIPS processor?
I wonder how much of that "domestic development" was looking at what foreign companies were making in their country and surrounding areas?
When you ship manufacturing overseas to countries with weak IP laws just to save a few bucks on labor (or hire H-1Bs to work here for the same reasons - knowledge goes back with them), well, karma's a bitch.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Third-world cretins with Third-world penis envy, who have this overwhelming need to "prove" how big and manly they are.
Muslims build really tall buildings (with Western technology and engineering).
These Chinese, it seems, prefer to build big computers. It's a natural consequence of having a basketcase dictatorship run by insecure little engineering majors.
Because that's all America does anymore.
Isn't that about where we can model the human brain brute force?
You're right, but it looks like they've done the latter. http://laotsao.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/sw1600-and-alpha-21164/
It says right in the ShenWei Wikipedia article that it's based on the DEC Alpha but something that strikes me as curious is that your article refers to a chip that lasted from 1995 to 1998. So I am to believe that by outright copying a fifteen year old chip from a processor line that has been extinct for a decade or more has yielded a modern day competitive multiprocessing chip?
You can convince me they copied DEC's work. You can convince me they violated IP laws. You can convince me that it is their societal norm to ignore restrictive IP laws. Hell, I'll tell you that right now. But to say that they are doing no work to build on top of these chips feels like it must be erroneous unless what we see is 1990s technology in the ShenWei processors.
This isn't a black and white scenario here. Yes, it's bad that IP laws have been violated. Yes, it's bad that DEC won't see a dime from any of their work being used. But it is also a good thing to have a competitive architecture arise in the world of computing and also it feels good to have a race with other countries for computing power. I can only hope our super computing budget is considered part of the onerous "defense budget" and our leaders who are concerned with a dick measuring contest can dump tons of money into supercomputers for modeling and simulation to scientists while at the same time being able to give the hallowed talking point of "I increased defense spending."
You can start with someone else's good idea, turn it into a great idea and share some credit, right?
My work here is dung.
5x faster sounds ambitious, but not off the wall for 2015. It gives them 3 years during which time one might expect a 4x increase in speed. I expect that they will get the top spot for a bit before being passed by something else relatively quickly.
The top10 is quite interesting.
There's a bunch of PPC BlueGene, UltraSparc VIIIfx, Xeons, Opterons and GPUs.
As for the processors, this will be an interesting workout for them. I think like the UltraSparc VIIIfx, it will be hard for them to match the Xeon or Opteron for a while, but for supercomputing it is somewhat easier since brute FPU power works well which means you can tack on a huge vector FPU onto a relatively pedestrian CPU for excellent results.
The other thing of course is the interconnect. The VIIIfx got an extra really good boost by having a very good interconnect on die, giving it an exceptional rmax/rpeak efficiency.
I haven't seenmuch about a domestically developed killer interconnect yet, but they may very well have one which is good enough, or in this round they may go for something COTS.
The Chinese government has been pushing domestically produced processors for a while now, and they have been improving from a very los start, very quickly. I don't doubt that they will catch up in many areas. IPC on a general purpose CPU is a game of diminishing returns.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And any answer it gives will be deemed 100% correct, even if it's not. Get used to, "2 + 2 = 5, and it always has. How dare you question the accuracy of our machine!!"
The reason for the size is that the censor chips will have to watch what the working chips try to share with other working chips.
I'm sure the US government will borrow some more money from China to build a bigger supercomputer.
And please, although the Chinese government is very corrupt, it is not more corrupt than US government or US corporations.
Transparency International says otherwise. Way, way otherwise.
Because they're not going to let us do to them what they know they've done to us.
Hey free trade everybody.. get your free trade riiiight over here! Free movement of goods services and people ... hey ... whatsamatter with you??? Doncha' love FREEDOM????
We should be introducing out first Exaflop machines.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Its estimated the installation to house the system and its hardware will require 40000 acres of forest to be leveled and cleared.102 nuclear power plants are under construction in the surround area. Chinese officials are still working on a method of cooling the supercomputer.
I wonder if the chinese will impose an export ban, preventing anyone "leaking" their technology to the USA?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
That's some serious content filtering they got going on. Complete with chastising AI.
Life is not for the lazy.
There is no such thing as a petaflop. FLOPS is both the singular and the plural of the term.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...they'll plug it in, flip the switch and nothing will happen.
It's getting the data there that's the rub. I'll bet most of these behemouths (misspelled by design) spend most of their time in idle loops waiting for something to work on...
BITD, I was working on a CRAY "mumble". It had a CDC 7600 for a front end to route data to and from it. We'd spend most of our allotted run time moving data into and out of the machine. The actual computation time was probably an order of magnitude less than the data movement phase (note the singular).
As long as there are companies trying to reverse engineer the Chinese chips then if there is a backdoor, it will be found. If a backdoor is found it will be really damaging to their reputation.
It's one thing to be suspected of espionage, it is another thing altogether to be caught putting backdoors into their products.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I've seen lots of claims that the SW chips are Alpha-based, and I wish I could get my hands on one if they are, but...
Last I checked, the Alpha pedigree supposedly came from Longsoon.
Yeah right indeed. The Longsoon chips run standard mips64 linux.
Address width is similar to Alpha, though.
And by the way...if it really is mips64, then it's a pathetic knockoff:
-quad issue is standard mips64 (Longsoon appears to be a single-issue clone, from what I've read; some chips are dual-issue)
-standard speed ranges from 400 MHz (Sierra PMC lowend) to 2.5+ GHz (XLPII)
The 1.1 GHz listed is just shy of the EV7z (1.3 GHz), the last Alpha version.
-cores range from 1 to 64 (Cavium Octeon/Nitrox)
--59-bit physical address space is standard with the official design, from what I've read. This is 40-bit.
In other words, it's 1 TB RAM here (equal to ARMv7 LPAE and Alpha) vs 256 TB on amd64 vs half an exabyte with stock mips64.
Is so... 2012.
And, naturally, it's planned to use a domestically developed MIPS processor
Or in other words, a domestically developed MIPS processor that is a copy based on in the US/EU.
The unpunished criminal behaviour of the NY financial industry easily trumps any corruption the Chinese can come up with. It has already destroyed large parts of the US economy and ethics. The MIC calls for war, war, war because it means profits for them.
Meanwhile China has made several large steps forward. So you tell me who is actually (more) corrupt ?
Chinas rail system is already much better than the American one. Their financial system serves the people, not the cyncial bastards of NY. If America does not fix this, it will be smoked in a decade.
a Beowulf Cluster of those!
It doesn't seem to have damaged Microsoft very much.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Has anyone heard about a project to develop a 100 PF machine by a group in Santa Fe, New Mexico? There were rumors locally a couple of months ago, but I can't find any other information about it.
Ans. Chinx
Before anyone's panties get in too tight a bundle here, we probably should actually follow the link and do that quaint, old-fashioned thing called "reading", which would lead us to notice that the person interviewed says: "I think in the future, as China tries to reach for exascale computing, the designs of these new supercomputers could fully rely on domestic processors. I wouldn't dismiss the possibility." and "But of course, we could take a different road, and end up using both foreign and domestic chips".
Rest easy, they don't even have their architecture figured out yet.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
And the evidence of their "backdoor" is what again?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.