What's new

China's supercomputer surprises U.S. experts

Lankan Ranger

ELITE MEMBER
Joined
Aug 9, 2009
Messages
12,550
Reaction score
0
China's supercomputer surprises U.S. experts

China has made its first supercomputer based on Chinese microprocessor chips, an advance that surprised high-performance U.S. computing specialists.

The announcement was made this week at a technical meeting held in Jinan, China, organised by industry and government organisations. The new machine, the Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province in eastern China.

The Sunway system, which can perform about 1,000 trillion calculations per second a petaflop will probably rank among the 20 fastest computers in the world. More significantly, it is composed of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, designed at a Chinese computer institute and manufactured in Shanghai.

Currently, the Chinese are about three generations behind the state-of-art chip making technologies used by world leaders such as the United States, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

“This is a bit of a surprise,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee and a leader of the Top500 project, a list of the world's fastest computers.

Last fall, another Chinese based supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, created an international sensation when it was briefly ranked as the world's fastest, before it was displaced in the spring by a rival Japanese machine, the K Computer, designed by Fujitsu.

INTERNAL SYSTEM

But the Tianhe was built from processor chips made by U.S. companies, Intel and Nvidia, though its internal switching system was designed by Chinese computer engineers. Similarly, the K computer was based on Sparc chips, originally designed at Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley.

Mr. Dongarra said the Sunway's theoretical peak performance was about 74 per cent as fast as the fastest U.S. computer the Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, made by Cray Inc. That machine is currently the third fastest on the list.

The Energy Department is planning three supercomputers that would run at 10 to 20 petaflops. And the United States is embarking on an effort to reach an exaflop, or 1 million trillion mathematical operations in a second, sometime before the end of the decade, although most computer scientists say the necessary technologies do not yet exist.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

To build such a computer from existing components would require immense amounts of electricity roughly the amount produced by a medium-sized nuclear power plant.

In contrast, Mr. Dongarra said it was intriguing that the power requirements of the new Chinese supercomputer were relatively modest about 1 megawatt, according to reports from the technical conference. The Tianhe supercomputer consumes about 4 megawatts and the Jaguar about 7.

The ShenWei microprocessor appears to be based on some of the same design principles that are favoured by Intel's most advanced microprocessors, according to several supercomputer experts in the United States.

But there is disagreement over whether the machine's cooling technology is appropriate for designs that will be required by the exaflop-class supercomputers of the future.

Photos of the new Sunway supercomputer reveal an elaborate water-cooling system that may be a significant advance in the design of the very fastest machines.

“Getting this cooling technology correct is very, very difficult,” said Steven Wallach, chief scientist at Convey Computer, a supercomputer firm based in Richardson, Texas.

“This tells me that this is a serious design. This cooling technology could scale to exaflop. They are in the hunt to win.”

The Hindu : News / International : China's supercomputer surprises U.S. experts
 
56602609-the-nebulae.jpg


Take a look at the machine above. It's the world's most powerful computer and it belongs to China, according to the latest edition of the Top 500 list of fastest supercomputers, unveiled yesterday.

China's Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin achieved a performance of 2.57 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), taking the title away from the Cray XT5 "Jaguar" system, rated at 1.759 petaflops, at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

There are two main design aspects in the Tainhe-1A system that stand out. First it uses more than 7,000 graphical processing units, the number-crunching accelerators known as GPUs. Other supercomputers have been using GPUs for a while, but this is the first time that the No. 1 system is a GPU-based design. It's also interesting to note that these are not Chinese-designed chips; China got them from U.S. chip maker Nvidia. The second interesting thing about the Tianhe-1A is that it uses a custom interconnection fabric to move data between all those GPUs. It seems that the Chinese engineers were able to make this proprietary interconnect very fast. How fast?

I spoke to Tarek El-Ghazawi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at George Washington University and co-director of the NSF Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing. El-Ghazawi, who was recently at a NSF meeting with computer scientists in China, tells me that the Chinese interconnect appears to achieve 160 gigabits per second, which is roughly twice as fast as QDR InfiniBand, the fastest interconnect technology commercially available in the United States. As for how the Chinese were able to pull this off, details haven't emerged, Dr. El-Ghazawi says.

This is the second time the United States has lost the No. 1 position in the past 10 years. The first time was in June 2002, when Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer took the top spot and remained there for more than two years. That development shook the U.S. supercomputing community. At the time, a great number of researchers believed that clusters built from cheap commodity parts would suffice for most supercomputing needs and that research in new architectures shouldn't be a priority.

The United States responded by investing heavily into high-performance computing research, particularly through DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program, with funds of nearly US $1 billion. At about the same time, IBM began designing its Blue Gene series, and a version of that system, the Blue Gene/L at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, unveiled in 2004, reclaimed the No. 1 spot.

Now news of the Chinese supercomputer leaping ahead is again shaking the U.S. scientific community. At a post-election press conference, U.S. President Barack Obama said, “We just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth. That used to be us. They’re making investments because they know those investments will pay off over the long-term.”

But Dr. El-Ghazawi notes that the ranking could change again soon. He says that next year IBM will unveil a new powerful system called Blue Waters and in 2012 Japan is expected to introduce its massively parallel K Computer, built by Fujitsu. Both Blue Waters and the K Computer are designed to perform at more than 10 petaflops.

It's also important to emphasize that rankings like the Top 500 don't tell the whole story. To be sure, they are useful benchmarks, but they are not always representative of real-world applications. Though some problems (like climate modeling) work well in current supercomputers, other applications (like data mining) don't. In other words, even if you have the world's fastest supercomputer, it's going to be pretty much useless if you can't program it to solve practical problems. It turns out that writing programs for these machines remains one of the field's toughest problems. It would be nice to see more progress in this area
 
Last month INDIA brought a PC for just 3500 rs :enjoy:

Comparing to that :undecided:

India BOUGHT a PC because India IS NOT CAPABLE TO BUILD ONE BY HERSELF while China is able to crank out Supercomputers.
China does not depend on the West while India is at the West's mercy for everything.
 
Dont mind bro, in India all fake products are china made :eek:

---------- Post added at 04:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:50 PM ----------



It was meant to be "made" or manufactured :P

Read here :

Drugs banned: yet available in India
Drugs banned: yet available in India

Despite an aspiring 10 percent economic growth and a growing health industry especially medical tourism, the health sector is severely affected by the increasing production and promotion of certain banned and fake drugs in all across the country.

In fact the latest reports suggest that India is one of the few countries that export large amount of various fake drugs to different parts of the world.

Many of the drugs that have been banned in developed countries are easily available in India. Chemists don’t hesitate to sell those drugs at their shops as doctors are continuously prescribing those medicines despite knowing their implication and side effects on the patient.

In fact the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation run by the government of India has not made any strict guideline over a list of drugs that have been banned by European Union and USA.

The most pitiable feature is that not many of us know about those banned drugs and use regularly that causes long term implication for our physical health. The official first needs to lay down stringent laws and direct drug manufactures not to produce those.

Some of the common ones that are easily available and people use frequently without doctor’s prescription are D-cold, Nimesulide and Analgin. These are used as pain-killers but latest research shows that long term use of such medicines can affect human health in various ways by damaging liver, causing irregular heartbeats, depression, blood pressure fluctuations etc. This is the prime reason that most of European countries have disqualified and banned the manufacturing and consumption of these drugs.

However, Indian government has not woke up to the fact of these dangerous as well as spurious drugs that can be seen in central government’s Drug and Cosmetic Act which is yet to be re-evaluated after its formation in 1940 though has added various other concerns under Pharmacy Act. The act has only banned a combination of drugs per doses and also depending on particular diseases, but not these common medicines.

In fact even those drugs banned in India are easily and readily available in the market. Here comes the question of awareness as some manufacturer tell that they are not aware of the latest report. In fact it can be possible through a joint effort by the government, doctors, chemists’ association, and manufacturers. The physicians also need to update themselves with the latest developments regarding any adverse effects of drugs.

US bans key Indian drug imports
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7620287.stm

In July, US prosecutors had alleged that Ranbaxy, India's largest pharmaceutical company, deliberately lied about the quality of its low-cost drugs, including those for HIV.

The US Department of Justice wanted the firm to hand over key documents relating to drug testing procedures.
 

Country Latest Posts

Back
Top Bottom