China's first petaflop supercomputer fully assembled

[Brotherhood]

China's first petaflop supercomputer fully assembled - People's Daily Online September 02, 2010

The 13 computer cabinets containing the Tianhe-1, China's first domestically-made petaflop supercomputer, have been installed and it is scheduled to begin system debugging and testing in September, according to the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.

Earlier this year, the first device of Tianhe-1, a computer system capable of reaching a peak performance of 1,000 trillion floating point operations per second, was put into operation at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.

The Tianhe-1 supercomputer system is now providing 24-hour remote network applications and running in good condition. After the petaflop computer system is completed, the calculation tasks will be transferred to the petaflop system. Currently, the number of users of the National Supercomputing Center in Beijing and Tianjin is gradually increasing.

With high-performance CPU chips, the system's overall processing power has increased substantially and its information security is receiving more technological guarantees.

The Tianhe-1 was successfully developed by the Changsha-based National University of Defense Technology in 2009, and China thus became the world's second country capable of developing petaflop supercomputers after the United States. It was ranked fifth on the list of the Top-500 supercomputers issued in November 2009.

One second of calculations conducted by Tianhe-1 is equivalent to 88 consecutive years of calculations by 1.3 billion people, and the data that the supercomputer can store is equivalent to the sum of the collections in four national libraries with 27 million books each.

The Tianhe-1 will mainly be used for animation rendering, biomedical research, aerospace equipment development, processing of resource exploration and satellite remote sensing data, data analysis for financial engineering, weather forecasts, new materials development and design and theoretical calculations in general science.

By Huang Beibei, People's Daily Online

 

[somebozo]

seeing its a defense developed computer we expect the quality to Chinese defense toys to improve remarkably.

Congratulation to China for another feat accomplished.

 

[azfar]

great achievement. Is it fully indigenous or some parts imported?

 

[Icarus]

Congratulations to China on yet another ground breaking feat, you guys have raised the bar(again) for us.

 

[ek_indian]

Good job by China.

 

[WAQAS119]

 

[gpit]

One question: who produced the CPUs that the computer uses? Is that domestic or foreign?

 

[somebozo]

CPU in any super computer these days will be Intel, AMD or IBM PowerChip.
These days building super computers have become easy like playing lego. One can stack virtually unlimited number of servers of blades using interconnects and achive a combined computing power.

Tianhe-I uses Intel Xeon processors with 5120 AMD GPUs provided by 2560 dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 GPUs[5]. The supercomputer is installed at National Super Computer Center, Tianjin and is used to carry out computations for petroleum exploration and aircraft simulation.[4] TH-1 runs an operating system based on the Linux kernel.[6]
Source: Wikipedia

 

[CardSharp]

Some more news along the same theme

Beijing Genomics Institute has purchased 128 Illumina next generation DNA sequencing machines.

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ: ILMN) announced today that the BGI (formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute) has purchased 128 HiSeq 2000 sequencing systems, representing the largest single order for next-generation sequencing systems to date. Most of the units will be installed in BGI’s new state-of-the-art genome center in Hong Kong.

What this means that that China will have more DNA sequencing power than all of the world COMBINED!



I was really excited when I hear this news back in Jan. This may be the first step for China to become the future leader of genomics and biotech.

 

[CardSharp]

More info from a Prof's blog

BGI: Beijing Genomics Institute

In an earlier post I mentioned BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute, now located in Shenzhen). Below are some excerpts from a Nature article about the Institute, which is funded by a $1.5 billion dollar (!) loan from the China Development Bank.

Some of the researchers at BGI are very young -- the article profiles two who are in their early 20s and already have significant responsibility. Is this really so strange? After all, people who lead teams at startups or at Google or FaceBook, developing key infrastructure, are often not much older.

Nature even ran an editorial about this: Do scientists really need a PhD? Bioinformatics is a good field to try this in as it is computing intensive (even youngsters can produce good code) and a relatively new field (the background genetics and statistics can be taught fairly quickly to smart kids). On the opposite end of the spectrum: particle or string theory, in which even supersmart kids will barely have their footing after 3-5 years of post-BA work. The contrast between fields in which people can quickly get started in research, versus those that have a steep learning curve and lots of accumulated depth, makes for constant misunderstandings and debates over how graduate education should be structured.

Below are pictures of BGI's director and two of the young researchers.




Nature: In 2006, Li Yingrui left Peking University for the BGI, China's premier genome-sequencing institute. Now, freckled and fresh-faced at 23 years old, he baulks at the way a senior BGI colleague characterized his college career — saying Li was wasting time playing video games and sleeping during class. "I didn't sleep in lectures," Li says. "I just didn't go."

He runs a team of 130 bioinformaticians, most no older than himself. His love of games has served him well when deciphering the flood of data spilling out of the BGI's sequencers every day. But "science is more satisfying" than video games, he says. "There's more passion."

The people at the BGI — which stopped officially using the name Beijing Genomics Institute in 2007 after moving its headquarters to Shenzhen — brim with passion, and an ambition so naked that it unsettles some. In the past few years the institute has leapt to the forefront of genome sequencing with a bevy of papers in top-tier journals. Some recent achievements include the genomes of the cucumber1, the giant panda2, the first complete sequence of an ancient human3 and, in this issue of Nature4, the genomes of more than 1,000 species of gut bacteria, compiled from 577 billion base pairs of sequence data.

The mission, BGI staff say with an almost rehearsed uniformity, is to prove that genomics matters to ordinary people. "The whole institute feels this huge responsibility," says Wang Jun, executive director of the BGI and a professor at the University of Copenhagen. The strategy is to sequence — well, pretty much anything that the BGI or its expanding list of collaborators wants to sequence (see 'Mass production'). It has launched projects to tackle 10,000 microbial genomes and those of 1,000 plants and animals as part of an effort to create a genomic tree of life covering the major evolutionary branches. Important species, such as rice, will be sequenced 100 times over, and for humans there seems no limit to the number the institute would like sequenced.

To fulfil that mission, the BGI is transforming itself into a genomics factory, producing cheap, high-quality sequence with an army of young bioinformaticians and a growing arsenal of expensive equipment. In January, the BGI announced the purchase of 128 of the world's newest, fastest sequencers, the HiSeq 2000 from Illumina, each of which can produce 25 billion base pairs of sequence in a day. When all are running at full tilt, the BGI could theoretically sequence more than 10,000 human genomes in a year. This puts it on track to surpass the entire sequencing output of the United States, says David Wheeler, director of the Molecular Biology Computational Resource at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "It is clear there is a new map of the genomics world," he says.

The charge that the BGI has reduced science to brute mechanization does little to ruffle feathers in Shenzhen. Wang himself quips that the BGI brings little intellectual capital into projects: "We are the muscle, we have no brain." But such comments belie a quiet confidence, in everyone from the BGI's seasoned management to its youngest recruits, that they can make an impact not just to the balance of sequencing power but also in biology, medicine and agriculture. This will be a challenge given the significant loans taken out to expand capacity. Torn between scientific and financial goals, even its founder can't seem to decide whether the BGI is a business or a non-profit research institute. Genome scientists around the world are watching to see how it will strike a balance.

... With this breathing room, the BGI has grown to employ 1,500 people nationwide, more than two-thirds of them in Shenzhen, and this is expected to jump to 3,500 by the end of the year. With the investment in new sequencers, provided by a 10-billion-renminbi loan from the China Development Bank, the BGI's capacity will grow, but so will costs.

... The BGI's Luo Ruibang, also a student at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, turned 21 while at his last scientific meeting. He says he's had trouble convincing other scientists that, lacking doctoral training, he can do top-notch science. "A lot of the foreigners wonder if I'm really capable," he says. Luo and Li were co-first authors on a paper9 describing the discovery of large DNA segments in the Asian and African genomes that are absent in the Caucasian genome.

Li and his bosses are confident that this youth brigade can piece together and verify sequences. "It is a new field," says Wang. "There is not much experience anyway." But interpreting data and designing experiments are two different things, and BGI staff admit a dearth of knowledge in the latter. "We don't know much about biology," Li says. Liu says the BGI needs to overcome its biological blindspot, but he is supportive of its mission. "They are primarily sequencers, but smart ones with big guns," he says.

... Research alone is not going to pay back the 10-billion renminbi bank loan. The BGI makes some income from collaborations, which account for 40% of the sequencing workload. Outsourced sequencing services for universities, breeding companies or pharmaceutical companies bring in higher margins and account for another 55% of the workload (the final 5% is the BGI's own projects). In 2009, the BGI pulled in 300 million renminbi in revenue. That is not enough, says BGI marketing director Hongsheng Liang. In 2010, Liang hopes to pull in 1.2 billion renminbi.

New income could come from proprietary rights to agricultural applications. The BGI, which owns more than 200 patents, has been attempting to do genomics-based breeding with foxtail millet in Hebei and has other agricultural projects in Laos. More cash could come from expansion of services overseas. Within three years, the institute plans to open offices in Copenhagen and San Francisco. The BGI may also charge for access to its Yanhuang database, a project launched in 2008 to sequence the genomes of 100 Chinese; BGI scientists say they would like to expand this number into the thousands. Although according to Yang, it would be charging "at cost" — to cover computational expenses and maintenance, not for the data. ...

 

[WillBeBack]

CPU in any super computer these days will be Intel, AMD or IBM PowerChip.
These days building super computers have become easy like playing lego. One can stack virtually unlimited number of servers of blades using interconnects and achive a combined computing power.

china has its plane to develop own CPU, and put in use to new supercomputer. have to admit, before that, all american chips.

and you've raise a old topic which is also covered by many Chinese forums that if building a supercomputer as easy as combining computer power?

and the answer is no. if it is as easy as that, why the majority of top500 supercomputers are still american, other counties could buy as many chips as needed to build a better one as well as build more.

 

[Nomenclature]

China is doing well with super computers at the moment, especially with regards to integrating GPUs into a system.

 

[Martian2]

One question: who produced the CPUs that the computer uses? Is that domestic or foreign?

The CPUs are domestic.

China's fastest super computer to have China-made chips - People's Daily Online

"China's fastest supercomputer to have China-made chips
10:01, March 09, 2010

China's fastest supercomputer "Tianhe-1," ("Tianhe" meaning Milky Way), is to be equipped this year with China-made central processing unit (CPU) chips, replacing the only part of the computer that is currently imported.

Zhang Yulin, president of the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) which developed the computer, told Xinhua Monday that the chips, also developed by the NUDT, are customized for this supercomputer.

"The new CPUs will greatly raise the peak speed and computing efficiency of 'Tianhe-1'," Zhang said on the sidelines of the annual session of the National People's Congress, the country's top legislature now meeting in Beijing.

"Tianhe-1," unveiled in October last year, could rival the world's most powerful computers. Theoretically, it is capable of more than one quadrillion calculations per second when operating at peak speed.

Experts note that one day's task for "Tianhe-1" might take 160 years for a mainstream dual-core personal computer to complete."

"Technician tests Tianhe-1 (TH-1) supercomputer at north China's Tianjin, Dec. 25, 2009. The supercomputer, named Tianhe (meaning Milky Way), is theoretically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second at peak speed, which was already partly installed in Tianjin." (Source: Xinhua)

China's first petaflop supercomputer to be fully assembled in late August - People's Daily Online

"China's first petaflop supercomputer to be fully assembled in late August
17:14, August 06, 2010

The main components of the "Tianhe-1," China's first domestically-made petaflop supercomputer, have been transported to Binhai District in Tianjin, and the computer is expected to be fully assembled in late August, according to the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin on Aug. 5.

Three subsystems for computing, accessing the Internet, and input/output have reached Tianjin and are currently being installed. In addition, the supporting systems of cooling and power supply are ready for use. The "Tianhe-1" will be completely debugged after it is fully assembled, and if everything goes smoothly, it will be put into operation within 2010.

The "Tianhe-1" was successfully developed by the Changsha-based National University of Defense Technology in 2009, and China thus became the world's second country capable of developing petaflop supercomputers, only after the United States.

The "Tianhe-1" was ranked fifth on the list of the Top-500 supercomputers issued in November 2009. One–second calculations conducted by "Tianhe-1" are equivalent to 88 consecutive years of calculations by 1.3 billion people, and the data that the supercomputer can store is equivalent to the sum of the collections in four national libraries, each holding 27 million books.

The "Tianhe-1" will mainly be used for animation rendering, biomedical research, aerospace equipment development, processing of resource exploration and satellite remote sensing data, data analysis for financial engineering, weather forecasts, new materials development and design and theoretical calculations in general science."

 

[Cartman]

Heh maybe judgement day will happen in China first .
It's good that China is focusing more on high end manufacturing. Does the CPU have a name?

 

[Jazzbot]

all hail china
now make a super engine for jet fighters quickly