China Builds World's Fastest Supercomputer Without U.S. Chips (computerworld.com)

Reader dcblogs writes: China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors. There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops (Linpack is 93 petaflops), according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers. It has been long known that China was developing a 100-plus petaflop system, and it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level. But just over a year ago, in a surprising move, the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers. The U.S. initiated this ban because China, it claimed, was using its Tianhe-2 system for nuclear explosive testing activities. The U.S. stopped live nuclear testing in 1992 and now relies on computer simulations. Critics in China suspected the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts. There has been nothing secretive about China's intentions. Researchers and analysts have been warning all along that U.S. exascale (an exascale is 1,000 petaflops) development, supercomputing's next big milestone, was lagging.

Comments

More info at ...

[Taco Cowboy]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fe7e...

http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

http://top500.org/news/china-t...

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6...

http://www.netlib.org/utk/peop...

Or my (rejected) submission at https://slashdot.org/submissio...

Re:"Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5"

[homes32]

I was curious what OS it runs. TOP500 says "Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5". Googling "Sunway" is just giving me some Malaysian resort town, and "RaiseOS" yields nothing at all. Does anyone know anything about this OS? Is it Linux?

from TFA: "TaihuLight, which is installed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise. "

Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs?

[Taco Cowboy]

... The processor is divided into four core groups, each with 64 computing processing elements (CPE) and a management processing element (MPE). Each core group also includes a memory controller delivering an aggregate memory bandwidth of 136.5 GB/second on each socket. It runs at a relatively modest 1.45 GHz and supports just a single execution thread per core ...

The above was from my (rejected) submission on the same computer

As it is too big I won't quote the entire submitted article here, suffice to give you the link to it - https://slashdot.org/submissio...

Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha

[kriston]

The older systems, like Longson, are MIPS using a questionable license with patent problems.

These systems are directly derived from DEC Alpha.

So, not homegrown, more like "homecloned" from US chips and then enhanced.

In other words, the hard work was already done, and they just took it.

Teachable moment for the pols

[DarkOx]

So the moral of the story here ought to be that while the USA may be a tech leader, it isn't as if there are not tech centers in the rest of the world more than capable of building technology on the leading edge.

So when people the like the FBI director make asinine statements like how people will switch to non US crypto technologies and message platforms only 'theoretically' they should respond with laughter.

CONgress and the Administration need to pull their heads out of their assess (which will be hard given how far up there they are) and realize that if they insist on stupid export controls and technology that legally has to be broken by design; they will accomplish none of their security goals and only harm our economy in the process.

Re:pointless brute force super computing

[goombah99]

I found some data on watts. It looks like the chinese computer is 16MW and the Titan is 8MW. So it appears they are using lower power, slower CPUs on the SHenWei. Overall this means they are getting better petaflops per watt than the US computer. Thus I was incorrect in saying it was pointless brute force. They are one the way to lower gigaflops/watt.

Re:pointless brute force super computing

[hattig]

Yeah, the Chinese Supercomputer is using 1.45 GHz 260-core custom-ISA 64-bit RISC chips.

Yup, 260 cores. Each with a 256-bit FMAC SIMD unit. It's not a traditional CPU architecture, it clearly uses some aspects of Intel's Larrabee/Knights Landing platform, and GPU architectures (in particular the cache arrangement).

Each chip can process 3 TFLOPS of double precision floating point.

Re:pointless brute force super computing

[AmiMoJo]

Titan manages 466kW/petaflop, while TaihuLight manages 164kW/petaflop. The Chinese computer is much, much more efficient. It's also worth noting that much of Titan's performance is due to GPUs, which are not general purpose CPUs and can't be used for arbitrary computing tasks.

Comparing the number of cores is pointless, it's the work done per watt and per yuan that's important. And it's not like you could just scale Titan up, it would need about 90MW just to run which causes both supply and severe heat problems.

The CPUs the Chinese have built are really impressive. Performance is on a par with Intel's latest Xeno Phi chips, but they developed their own ISA and silicon from scratch, and then compilers and a Linux port.