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

Comments

Could You Clarify Something for Me?

[eldavojohn]

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?

Re:Could You Clarify Something for Me?

[guruevi]

Why is it bad that DEC (a defunct company) can't profit from their imaginary property in a country that has no protection from or laws against such use. The US Government can also appropriate technology and materials from private corporations within their sovereign state without compensation.

DEC attempted to market their solution and failed miserably, they made their money back by selling it to Intel (so actually it's currently Intel's Imaginary Property). If someone else can improve upon their design (which was quite good actually especially in floating point operations) then I can only applaud their work. Just because it's the boogeyman-du-jour that's developing it doesn't make a difference to me.

Re:Could You Clarify Something for Me?

[ByOhTek]

Have you ever used one of those things? They were amazing chips for their time, especially with their bus architecture. They were great for SMP usage.

AMD and Intel managed to get ahold of a lot of the developers and IP related to these chips, and wedged it into their systems. I'd be very surprised if you still couldn't find traces of it in their systems today. I know not long after AMD got their share, their SMP performance shot up massively, and when it comes to SMP use, they are still better at it than Intel (though, their per-core lack of performance, sadly makes up for this).

So, yeah, with a die shrink, I could see these being amazing for a multi-core behemoth, and competitive with anything extant on the market right now. The only reason we don't see these today, I suspect, is because Intel got most of the IP, and used it to make the Itanium, and the wouldn't produce a competitor for their pet pink elephant.