China's first petaflop supercomputer fully assembled

[Nomenclature]

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?

From what I've read the CPU is developed by the National University of Defense Technology.

I'll make my guess it's some sort of processor based on MIPS architecture. So the system will have three different types of processors working together: x86 CPUs from Intel, GPUs from AMD/ATI and China's own MIPS CPUs. I'd say it's quite some integration going on here and definitely not Lego.

China is behind U.S in CPU design but who else isn't? And we're at least catching up.

For example, Ingenic, a privately-owned Beijing company, is exporting CPUs it designed (based on its XBurst architecture) to the U.S to be used in Linux netbooks. Of course those are processors used in lower-end devices, but it does make one feel good that we're now exporting CPU designed and fabricated in China to the United States. First step is always important no matter how tiny it is.

 

[akinkhoo]

regarding china's processor:
Intel lauds Chinese CPU development | Hardware - InfoWorld

btw, china also has an intel-nvidia based supercomputer, the reason for the intel processor is because that machine will be able to run windows client OS. that computer made headline by being the world 2nd most powerful computer, 2nd only to AMD powered "jaguar" supercomputer in US. however in theoretically processing power, it in fact surpasses jaguar as the most powerful computer in existence...

amazing comparing the fact that the chinese machine only has 1/3 as many processor, this was achieved by the used of GPU from nvidia, greatly increasing it's math processing power... and such CPU/GPU hybrid are likely to replace the obsolete CPU only machines used in the west, allowing China to leapfrogging these larger but outdated supercomputer...

 

[ao333]

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.

That's simply because most technologically advanced countries like Japan and Germany have full access to American and European supercomputers. China on the other hand cannot even secure access to Russian computers. It's military consolidation.

The art of supercomputers is to produce linked processors capable of processing certain tasks collectively faster than the same processors can process seperately. The goal is to reduce the overhead spent on using processor power to line up processors when processing only one task, or in stream processing -- reduce the overhead spent on wasteful inter-communication of processors when processing multiple tasks. Most of this is done physically but some is done with the help of a better OS. The point of the game is both how fast the whole supercomputer is and the computing power/core ratio.

For example if you have 200 cores linked together with supporting software, you will not get x200 the peformance when compared with a single core. Instead, when processing multiple tasks, each core will have to communicate with the other 199 cores in order to know what itself should do. This creates great inefficiencies, and this is why reducing/simplifying/physically dividing these communication is vitally important to processing large, linked quantities of data, because you can't just push the information into 200 different computers, since that in essence is the same with 200 inefficient cores.

The core numbers took to achieve the peak is indeed impressive. #1 took 1.9 times more cores with only 1.4 times the peformance, though the more the cores, the more difficult it is to maintain a high computing power/core ratio.

BTW: China has no capacity to fabricate even Intel 80486-equivalent processors, though it has become capable of designing those superior to 80586s in recent years.

 

[qwerrty]

From what I've read the CPU is developed by the National University of Defense Technology.

I'll make my guess it's some sort of processor based on MIPS architecture. So the system will have three different types of processors working together: x86 CPUs from Intel, GPUs from AMD/ATI and China's own MIPS CPUs. I'd say it's quite some integration going on here and definitely not Lego.

China is behind U.S in CPU design but who else isn't? And we're at least catching up.

i'd say japan & UK are ahead of china in this area. china is definitely catching up though..

Fujitsu Claims World's Fastest CPU

Fujitsu today debuted a new super chip at a technology event in Japan that it claims to be the world’s fastest CPU. It’s called the Venus SPARC64 VIIIfx which is capable of 128 GFLOPs--Intel's top of the line Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 for example, achieves roughly 76 GFLOPs.

*ttp://www.tomshardware.com/news/fujitsu-venus-sparc64-viiifx-cpu,7806.html

China's Godson gets vector boost, aims for 28 nm

The ICT has developed six generations of the MIPS-based Godson chips since it started work on the architecture in 2001. Hu presented a paper at Hot Chips focusing on the latest high-end part, the Godson 3B.

The eight-core processor runs at up to a gigahertz and consumes 40W in a 65-nm STMicroelectronics process. The chip--which taped out in May and will be in silicon in September--measures 300 mm2 and delivers 128 gigaflops, Hu said.

The core extends its previous 64-bit floating point unit with a 256-bit SIMD vector unit including eight 64-bit MACs. Engineers also created a unique interface to feed the chip with pre-formatted data.

Hu showed several board-level examples of designs that will use the 3B in servers or as nodes in massively parallel supercomputing clusters. Earlier this year Shenzhen-based computer maker Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd. created a petaflops system based on Intel and Nvidia processors and said its next generation will use the 16-core Godson 3C.

The eight-core Godson 3B is in the works at a time when AMD is already shipping a 12-core server chip. Intel described at Hot Chips its Westmere-EX, a 32nm dual-threaded, ten-core server processor with advanced security and virtualization features it will ship soon.

China's CPU engineers plan to leapfrog 45nm process technology, using a 28nm process for their next generation design. Hu optimistically predicted he will have a prototype 28nm Godson design by April, though real products will not be ready until 2012.

However, it's unclear where China will find a 28nm fab. It currently uses STMicro with TSMC as "a second source," Hu said.

*ttp://eetimes.eu/en/china-s-godson-gets-vector-boost-aims-for-28-nm.html?cmp_id=7&news_id=222903399&vID=209