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

Posted by msmash on from the supercomputer dept.

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.

6 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. More info at ... by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
  2. Re:"Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5" by homes32 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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. "

  3. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... 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...

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
  4. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by kriston · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --

    Kriston

  5. Re:pointless brute force super computing by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  6. Re:pointless brute force super computing by hattig · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.