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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.
It's highly likely the Chinese are lying to impress people, as usual.
Help, in trapped in a fortune cookie factory!
Lucky numbers: 3, 12, 26, 33, 50, 58
This happens when you don't allow export of your chips to someone who has the knowledge to design their own chips.
It gives them the incentive to accelerate development and deployment of their homegrown designs.
Not only do you lose a business opportunity, you're also in danger of losing your technology leadership.
a machine that can play Crysis on medium settings. The world waited with abated breath.
How many nude photo's did they have to send in to get the loan to built that thing?
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 !
Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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?
Yes but, how many of the chips are clones or copies?
Questions for those who know: Tianhe-2 is notoriously hard to program for. Will this be any better? And will USA ever catch up?
Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
The article mentions that the cluster uses "ShenWei CPUs" but doesn't give details, and the wiki only talks about chips that were released in 2010 and earlier. Is it using the Alpha instruction set (as Wikipedia seems to imply), or does it have additional instructions, or is it using something else entirely? Can you buy these things (and compatible motherboards) of AliExpress? Do they have an equivalent to IME?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?
Hopefully they reverse engineered out all the spy shit that gets built into anything made by a US company (who can be served a national security letter demanding they insert backdoors and not tell anyone about it). Not saying the Chinese won't build their own spy shit into their own chips, but it only makes sense to drop products made by US companies.
On the other hand, aren't all the 'US made chips' actually made in China anyway, and its really just the intellectual property that is US? And the Chinese don't really give a shit about US intellectual property ownership anyway?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
no I think its MIPS that served as the starting ground for most Chinese developed processors.
A quadrillion? That's alot of flops.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
If the Americans are the ones required to use espionage to figure out how they work, rather than the other way around, I'd say yes...
A computer built with hardware that was NOT made in China, that would be news.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We call them crisps.
Anything "Made in Japan" was junk. You always looked for the "Made in USA" label for quality. Definitely feels like the US passed the torch on to China.
Anyone know if they were able to remove the Intel logo from the CPUs?
Or has Intel embedded their logo into the functionality so thoroughly it can't be removed if you pirate the design?
This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors.
Our government seems to be stuck in the 1990s. They don't understand that intelligence and creativity isn't a monopoly of "Merica.
It should also show all of you who took Econ 101 at Ithaca Community College that "Comparative Advantage" is a fairy tale taught by academics who know nothing of today's globalized World.
Other than the singular purpose of doing the rare but interesting exascale problem the real utility of figuring out how to build exascale is to figure out how to build petascale cheaply on the "desktop". DOE's target for exascale is a scalable architecture that will sip mere megawatts of enegy this means that when they get there petawatt will be of the order of magnitude of 10KW. in other words, something easily power by a car engine. it will mean that petascale will be ubiquitous. Every hospital could have one in their basement.
the Titan super computer at oakridge has 299,008 cores and 18petaflops. if they built 5 of these they could hit 91 petaflops with 1.5 million cores. That's ten time fewer than the chinese super computer requires.
Now cores ain't everything. ultimately it's petaflops per watt but I don't have those statistics so I'm using cores as a proxy. I will admit that there is a school of thought in computer that having a lot of slow low power cores may be better than fewer fast high power cores whenever the bottleneck is memory bandwidth. And since I don't know the chinese architecture I don't know if that's what they are doing here.
Nonethe less. for mere factors of 10, brute forcing is always possible and doesn't really advance the state of the art--- that is, you cant scale that to factors of 1000 by brute force. You have to drop the power per petawatt to get anywhere. Scaling up to more cores can even be counter productive for any problem involving long range coupling between cores. Thus while it gets you more embarassingly paralell flops it doesn't get you better calculations on real problems.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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
Theoretical maximum performance is not what we use to measure actual, real-world rankings.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Or even turn on?
It really is non-US chips no matter how they got the original blueprints. The notion of US intellectual property in China is laughable at best. Additionally, China may not have a lot of folks that can invent, and that pretty much goes for all other countries because Intel is actually that good at being a brain drain but I digress, but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing on quite remarkable scales. So while they may not invent the process for 5nm chips, once they see one done and get a few pictures of the process, they're pretty good at putting the pieces together to get up and running.
However, it is my opinion that the bigger point here isn't that China is great at stealing technology, it is that China, and more so the world, honestly doesn't need American technology especially if the Americans are so hell bent in making insecure devices and resorting to petty trade restrictions to maintain some sort of faux-superiority position because the American legislative body finds in unstylish to fund actual research to maintain a real superiority position or they feel that real superiority is found in funding some guy digging a tunnel to extract black rocks, pumping dead liquid dinosaur remains from the ground, or ensuring that humans build crap at ineffective rates.
If anything Americans should take this as a sign that their priorities are insanely messed up. Doubtful that they would actually do anything about it, but at least they can know that all their Jerry Springer level bickering will ultimately mean that they need to resort to more and more useless childish games on ensuring that they stay relevant on the global stage. The downside to that is that the rest of the world has to suffer these stupid antics because Americans can't grow up and admit that they're loosing the top spot.
It's entirely possible this is an extravagant expense to hit #1 in Top500, but not able to do anything else. Looking at the architecture, about all that system can do is run xhpl really good. They talk about practical applications, but it seems the described system skimps on all sorts of things that would be important for real work, but not needed as much for xhpl benchmark runs.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
China is going to conquer the world!
China may not have a lot of folks that can invent ... but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing
Do you see the problem with this sentence?
Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?
Hopefully they reverse engineered out all the spy shit that gets built into anything made by a US company (who can be served a national security letter demanding they insert backdoors and not tell anyone about it). Not saying the Chinese won't build their own spy shit into their own chips, but it only makes sense to drop products made by US companies.
On the other hand, aren't all the 'US made chips' actually made in China anyway, and its really just the intellectual property that is US? And the Chinese don't really give a shit about US intellectual property ownership anyway?
Companies like Intel and AMD actually do have their own domestic fabs. It's one reason AMD has had such a hard time keeping up with Intel - these facilities literally cost billions. It takes a ton of capital to shrink process sizes, design new chips, and retool equipment.
A lot of components on a motherboard would be made abroad, as well as the circuit boards you see on the back of a hard drive or SSD. What really gets made overseas though, is all the embedded chips found in things like cars, TVs, stereos, and appliances. These are usually microcontrollers (likely 8-bit) or nothing much more powerful than a Z80 CPU. This isn't nearly pushing the envelope of technology, it's well-known components that just need to get produced. It makes sense to go with the cheapest volume manufacturer and right now, that's going to be someplace in Asia.
These systems are directly derived from DEC Alpha.
I seriously wonder where they got the Alpha stuff from. Did HP (after the DEC merger) sell it off (Carly?), was it stolen outright?
I for one mourn the Alphas, they packed serious punch. If only HP had kept those on instead of Itanic... we might be seeing a
bit more diversity in CPUs than what's essentially a duopoly x86 / ARM (yes, I know there's still SPARC etc., but seriously...).
Time to order millions of Chinese CPUs on alibaba
the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers
That's OK...they'll just use pulls from all the e-waste we ship over there.
Congratulations to all the Chinese students who studied at the USA's graduate & postgraduate electrical & computer engineering programs at the USA's magnificent land grant universities! Making good on your education, guys and gals!
Serious question. Was it developed in part or whole under government contract or with grant money? That's usually how they get to stick their noses in and tell private colleges how to run their affairs, for example. But I would think Intel is profitable enough to do their own R&D with no government money or interference.
> was it stolen outright?
About 20 years ago, our IT manager at DEC noticed an extremely large download being made to the office in Japan over the weekend. He killed the connection and investigated. They were accessing the Alpha design docs and got away with pretty much everything. They were just starting to download the process docs and didn't get very far. So we at the time knew we'd see something Alphaish popping up in China about a decade later. In 2006 the ShenWei appeared on the scene and it bore striking resemblance to the Alpha 21164A, the processor design docs that happened to be downloaded that weekend long ago.
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.
Think back to when Chips & Technologies made their own IBM PC-AT chipset (5 chips replacing the 63 the PC-AT used). It was nothing more than a clever clone... but once the clone happened it set in motion companies other than IBM to develop the standard. Think, for a moment, of the first 80386 system: the Compaq DeskPro 386. That was an original design, not cloned from IBM.
Yes, I completely agree. This is a "homecloned" system - for now. The next version is likely to have some innovations; the version following even more. Within 5 generations it will be it's own system.
Just like their non-US encryption.
Right, John Brennan?
The Chinese ability to reverse engineer being a superpower is a hoax. They can't even design jet engines and still have to buy them from Russia, because in the very high tech it's about understanding the basis, not just copying a layout.
"Additionally, China may not have a lot of folks that can invent, and that pretty much goes for all other countries because Intel is actually that good at being a brain drain but I digress, but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing on quite remarkable scales"
Ignoring known theft of processes (mandatory Chinese partners long enough to steal methods/IP): check
" China, and more so the world, honestly doesn't need American technology [theregister.co.uk] especially if the Americans are so hell bent in making insecure devices and resorting to petty trade restrictions to maintain some sort of faux-superiority position because the American legislative body finds in unstylish to fund actual research to maintain a real superiority position or they feel that real superiority is found in funding some guy digging a tunnel to extract black rocks, pumping dead liquid dinosaur remains from the ground, or ensuring that humans build crap at ineffective rates."
Leap from the topic to grandstanding about how the world doesn't need America because... personal opinions? Bonus points for non-related link: check
"If anything Americans should take this as a sign that their priorities are insanely messed up. Doubtful that they would actually do anything about it, but at least they can know that all their Jerry Springer level bickering will ultimately mean that they need to resort to more and more useless childish games on ensuring that they stay relevant on the global stage. The downside to that is that the rest of the world has to suffer these stupid antics because Americans can't grow up and admit that they're loosing the top spot."
National-level attacks mixed with stereotypes: check
The world has, and will continue to need American tech for the forseeable future. As much as developing economies come up with ways to take over the products we produce, they can't innovate nearly as effectively. That, combined with a gross difference in quality standards, means there will always be demand for American quality goods.
Oh, sorry. The ME is only for keeping an eye on our own citizens.
Have gnu, will travel.
They should have granted them access to the (very expensive and backdoored) Intel processors.
*cough* TSMC *cough* And yes, I know they're pure-play, but their market cap...
There is also PowerPC but again not all that common.
I remember seeing the Alpha when it first came out and thinking wow that is cool, too bad it will be a really big hit. I kept asking the rep about mass market products that would use it and they looked at me like I was nuts.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Where you obtained the above info that the CPU Chinese use to build their new Super is "very similar to DEC Alpha 21164"
Care to share your news source with us?
Thanks!
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.
As can be said of most innovation--building on the shoulders of giants.
China Builds World's Fastest Supercomputer Without U.S. Chip
Does this mean "world's fastest that doesn't use U.S. chip" or "didn't use U.S. chip to build world's fastest?"
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DNS servers NS2.OPS.CYBERTRUST.COM 64.18.26.147
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Browser lock is Geotrust Inc.
Was connecting to gn.symcd.com, then for 1 day it was connecting to eff.org, now it connects to gn.symcd.com AND omniroot.com
CIA interfering with operations Slashdot?
...
CCP is a godless communist party in China. CCP's history in China compares to China's thousands of years of history is but miniscule
Thus, CCP is not, cannot, and will never be the entire China
Throughout the thousands of years of Chinese history the Chinese worshiped (and still worshiping) their own deity (or deities)
Old habit dies hard
China's spaceship is call "Shen Zhou", translate to English "God's Ship" or "God's Vessel"
Many Chinese weapon systems also have "Shen" in their namesakes, having the meaning of "God" in the name of he product does not mean CCP will automatically interfere
So, please, stop being such a goddamn asswipe
Drink some water, calm down, and chill the fuck out!
The frame rate would be so high that the demons would be real!
You can hit ridiculously high numbers of FLOPS if you throw enough cores at it. Folding@home hits about 100 petaFLOPS this way. They're currently at about 200,000 CPUs + GPUs. If they could get 10 million participants, that would project out to 5 exaFLOPS, easily surpassing anything else in the top 500 list. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some criminal botnet is the "fastest supercomputer" by this measure.
The Loongson used unpatented MIPS instructions, only to license the patented instructions later. It is not an encumbered implementation.
This is typical of developing nations. The US did that to the UK in the 19th century. USA eventually got better too.
Companies like Intel and AMD actually do have their own domestic fabs. It's one reason AMD has had such a hard time keeping up with Intel - these facilities literally cost billions.
AMD has been fabless since 2009.
It's arbitrary, but top500 measures the largest systems by their ability to execute xhpl. It's not the *most* interconnect sensitive thing in the world, but it would not fare well on a folding@home, world community grid, etc type application.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I've run a bit of diging on the SW64 chip that reportedly powered the new ShenWei supercomputer
Based on the info I've gathered from http://bbs.lemote.com/forum.ph...
Version 1 of SW64 was 'inspired' by DEC's Alpha 21364 architecture instruction
By Version 3 (circa 2010), according to the same source, they have something called EKOPath, which, reportedly integrate AMD's X64 instuctions onto Alpha's platform
As Version 3 of the SW64 chip only comes in (max) 16-core, I believe the SW64 chip that are being used in the ShenWei supercomputer is of the latter version (because they supposed to have 64 cores per node)
Version 1, 2, and 3 of the SW64 chip has L1, L2 and L3 cache built in. The SW64 chips that are being used for the new ShenWei supercomputer reportedly doesn't have L1, L2, nor L3 cache at all
Furthermore, the frequency of chip has also increased from 1.1GHz to 1.45GHz, indicating a possible chip node shrinkage from the 65nm to a possible 28nm node that China currently possesses
That is about what I manage to gather so far
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Don't confuse can't with won't. China has some incredible engineers. You should know them, the USA educates a heck of a lot of them.
Your assertion that China's tendency toward arms tech importation over purely internal innovation represents a fundamental lack of technological development capabilities is sorely in error. China has long employed this strategy, with rather impressive aggregate cost/benefit outcomes over the last few decades, particularly with regard to Soviet era relations and continuing in earnest into the contemporary "new China, new Russia, same basic macro geopolitical landscape" model. Your UID is low enough that you really should understand all of this better than you apparently do. -PCP
This is the beginning of the decline of the tech industry in the USA.
Finally this empire will fall.
I know, fellow Americans will get butthurt and think I'm trolling. But, I'm not. Watch how you reply; your flag is showing!
Not going to comment on Intel's Larabee / Knight's Landing issue here because I don't know
From the info as have gathered, the first version of SW64 chip did have some built in cache, but by the new version of SW64 used in the supercomputer, the SW64 has neither L1, nor L2, nor L3 cache
Each core is allocated 12 KB of instruction cache, along with 64 KB of local scratchpad
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It doesn't make it ok but it does mean that entity1 doesn't really get to complain about it unless they have apologized and made reparations for their past, and to some extent still ongoing (but better disguised), egregious behaviour in this regard. The OP is not saying that what the Chinese are doing is fine but simply that the US is in no position to complain about it because this is how they have behaved, and to some extent still are, behaving (only better disguised as a legal patent system which foreign companies find strangely hard to win against US ones).
So the U.S. tried to halt China's cheeky supercomputing effort by banning the sale of Intel's chips? Reminds me of Tonya Harding's attempt to kneecap a rival. And the U.S. deservedly got what Tonya got: a big fat loss.
You know, this entire fiasco reminds me of a woman's "solution" style. Was Hillary Clinton still at State when the Intel ban was hatched?
Look at the power figures. This is already a highly modified system. I think the term "inspired by" is closer than copied. (There seem to be claims that there was a copy made about 20 years ago, but that's a lot of development time ago.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
US govt bans the export of HPC parts and starts a new industry outside the US.
Might have worked last century.
Let's hope they don't try the same strategy with encryption.
>>the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts.
How'd that work out for ya?
Well, at least according to Corney, they can't do crypto for shit.
Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind buying a computer with one of these Chinese chips in it. Better than one backdoored up the Yin Yang by a government that can actually ruin my chances in life for having the wrong opinions....Seriously, what do I care if the Chinese government spies on me? Why, that's correct, Mr Chen, my opinions on free speech are dangerously subsersive .... to China.
Just a reminder that if a USA patent is not validated in China, it is unprotected IP.
Funny. NASA buys their rocket systems from Russia? your point?
The Chinese ability to reverse engineer being a superpower is a hoax. They can't even design jet engines and still have to buy them from Russia, because in the very high tech it's about understanding the basis, not just copying a layout.
Russia: 143 million
US: 319 million
China: 1357 million
China armed with Russia's tech is a 10x greater threat than Russia. They don't need the best anything to be a superpower, they just need to be able to drag you into a battle of numbers either in manpower, simultaneous threats or manufacturing capacity. Like the Russians fighting the Nazis, they were dying by the millions but Stalin kept sending more and more men to the front. Or Custer's last stand for example. Technology is far from everything in warfare.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
NASA has never purchased a Russian Engine. ULA (United Launch Alliance) purchases Russian engines for their Atlas rockets. By 2018 ULA isn't going to be doing launches because SpaceX is going to be 20X cheaper and is already validated to carry crew. That doesn't even factor in the other private launchers like Blue Origin that are gearing up as alternatives too.
It's funny, the Russians, French and ULA all laughed when SpaceX launched. They aren't laughing anymore, SpaceX is projected to take almost 30% of the launches next year and it's only going to get worse from there as they can beat everyone else on cost. All the national launch programs have never considered cost and will likely be priced right out of the market.
SPARC has seen worse times than this. Like the UltraSPARC V and Rock failures. The current chips are actually decent.
PowerPC has been essentially put on life support by the current IBM management. So I wouldn't expect much more out of that. Shame.
Yeah this has been a major sticking point in there. But China is developing at least four military aircraft engines right now. One of which (WS-10A) has been already been accepted into service in their twin-engine J-16 fighter bugs and all. They also have a large turbofan in testing for their Y-20 transporter plane. You can find pictures of it (WS-20) in the testbed on the Internet.
NASA has never purchased a Russian Engine
Sure, they just pay Russia $490 million to ferry U.S. astronauts into space instead. It's all good. -PCP
They just come over to our universities, reverse engineer the Intel cores and get to experiment with the brightest in the industry as a side benefit, then take it back home and call it a day. China has an advantage cause they have the chip foundaries (thanks to other companies like Apple, IBM, AMD, Moto... and stuff in Taiwan/Japan).
Heck I have my intern sitting here and he's absorbing everything, wanting to see stuff from schematics & wiring to s/w and algos from historial projects. Bright guy nonetheless, hence why I picked him for an internship, BUT he's debating for a PhD or going home when he graduates--nothing about working in the US. PhD will just help him, going home will help... India. US? just some "free" short term work? Pennys.
We are not retaining these people to stay--there lies the real problem.
So you're saying that the fastest super computer in the world today is powered by CPUs that were designed 20 years ago? I find it very hard to believe that CPU designs from 20 years ago is anywhere near competitive in performance compared to current generation CPUs.
Wrong. http://www.space.com/26551-us-military-launches-russian-rocket-engines.html
Typical. You didn't even bother to read what you posted a link to did you? It states unequivocally that the private company that contracts to do the government launches (ULA) uses russian engines but the US government itself has never used them. Just like I said. Of course you didn't bother to read that either.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
The Soviets produced about 80,000 T34s in WW2.
The Germans produced 1,300 Tigers.
If they all met in one big battle of doom, the Germans would have to achieve a kill (not hit) ratio of well over 50% or they'd run out of ammo before the Russians ran out of tanks.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."