China's Tianhe-1A crowned supercomputer king

[CONNAN]

BBC News - China's Tianhe-1A crowned supercomputer king


China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer has been confirmed as the most powerful in the world.

Confirmation came with the publication of the latest list of the Top 500 supercomputers on the planet.

Tianhe-1A has a peak speed of 2.57 petaflops, far higher than the US XT5 Jaguar that can manage 1.76 petaflops.

The list also reveals significant changes in the technology used to power the machines and the nations hosting the most powerful ones.

Unconfirmed reports that Tianhe-1A would take the top spot on the list emerged in late October. Since then no other more powerful computers machines have emerged to knock it off the number one position.

Located at China's National Supercomputer Centre in Tianjin much of the machine's processing power comes from chips more typically found in graphics cards. It is expected to be doing simulations to help Chinese weather forecasts and to help with work to locate undersea oil fields.

Of the top four machines on the list, three are now largely built around graphics processors. By contrast the US Jaguar supercomputer that Tianhe-1A has pushed into second place is built around more traditional CPUs typically used in desktop computers.
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Top ten supercomputers

* Tianhe-1A - 2.57 petaflops
* XT5 Jaguar - 1.76 petaflops
* Nebulae - 1.27 petaflops
* Tsubame 2.0 - 1.19 petaflops
* XE6 Hopper - 1.05 petaflops
* Tera 100 - 1.05 petaflops
* Roadrunner - 1.04 petaflops
* Kraken XT5 - 0.83 petaflops
* Jugene - 0.82 petaflops
* Cielo - 0.81 petaflops

The top seven supercomputers on the list can now all carry out at least one petaflop which is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

The latest Top 500 list also reveals that the US is slipping down the rankings of supercomputer superpowers. Only five of the top ten machines are in the US, a change from other years in which American supercomputers have typically dominated the upper regions of the Top 500 list.

The US maintains its spot as the nation with the most supercomputers in the Top 500 list and China is now second. However, it has a long way to go to catch up as the US has 275 machines in the top 500 and China has only 42

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

This machine will certainly be very useful for us. (I think this news is a bit old though?)

I love the name, Tian he... Heavenly River.

 

[CONNAN]

This machine will certainly be very useful for us. (I think this news is a bit old though?)

I love the name, Tian he... Heavenly River.

16 November 2010 as per the article

 

[qwerrty]

according to this article, china is currently working on an exascale supercomputer, thousand times faster than the current fastest machine.

Supercomputers Fuel Competition


By DON CLARK

China's installation of the world's fastest supercomputer is galvanizing efforts by U.S. government agencies and companies to restore American leadership in the technology, a key tool in such fields as climate research, product design and weapons development.

Participants hope to outrace Chinese engineers in bringing a thousand-fold acceleration of today's most powerful machines—replaying a crusade in the past decade that leapfrogged a supercomputer in Japan that briefly held the world speed crown.

This time, the challenges could be much tougher. Achieving the next major leap in computing performance could require systems with as many as a billion electronic brains, as well as programming breakthroughs to exploit them. And Republicans in Congress bent on reducing deficits may be hard to persuade to subsidize such developments.

It's not going to be easy," concedes Horst Simon, deputy laboratory director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a major supercomputer user. But he says a case can be made that important scientific problems won't be solved without a new generation of systems. "It is really an economic-competitiveness issue and a national-security issue," he says.

Supercomputers are room-size collections of hundreds or thousands of processing units that can be used simultaneously on big number-crunching problems. Such systems were first used for defense-related chores, such as cracking communications codes, but now are widely used for jobs such as designing new cars and drugs.

The new Tianhe-1A machine in Tianjin, China, first publicly described last month, is expected to be a hot topic at a supercomputer conference this week in New Orleans. A new ranking to be released at the event will confirm preliminary estimates that the machine scored higher on standard computing tests than the Jaguar system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which previously had ranked as the world's fastest.

But the Tianhe-1A system is just one problem, U.S. supercomputer experts say. China, which also operates the third most powerful system, now accounts for 42 supercomputers on the semiannual Top 500 ranking, placing second behind the U.S. in large supercomputer installations.

Tianhe-1A among a handful of machines whose capabilities exceed a "petaflop," or a quadrillion scientific calculations per second. Chinese agencies have vowed to follow up with at least one system in five years that will reach 50 to 100 petaflops. Between 2016 and 2020 they expect to achieve one to 10 "exaflops," or a quintillion operations per second.

Labs run by the U.S. Department of Energy—which use supercomputers to simulate detonations of stockpiled nuclear weapons—are planning to build larger machines while helping draft a more ambitious "exascale" plan. Thomas Zacharia, deputy for science and technology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, estimates the effort will take $4 billion to $5 billion in added federal funding over eight years to develop needed hardware and software technologies.

In theory, such systems could be constructed by simply stringing together more of the components used in today's large systems. But DOE officials estimate that such a supercomputer would require a gigawatt of power to operate, or about the output of nuclear power plant. A major challenge for the exascale effort is raising the capacity of microprocessors and other chips while sharply reducing their power consumption.

Most of today's supercomputers use variants of the microprocessors that Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. popularized in PCs. The two biggest Chinese systems augment such chips with an added building block—graphics processing units, the variety of chips that render images in videogames.

Such accelerator chips are expected to play a role in exascale systems and are being used by some manufacturers already. On Monday, Silicon Graphics International Corp. plans to introduce an ultracompact system called Prism XL that offers a choice of accelerators—either GPUs from AMD or Nvidia Corp., or chips from start-up Tilera Corp. that accelerate different types of calculations.

Intel is developing accelerator chips based on its x86 microprocessor design, which it says will be easier to program than alternatives. Smooth-Stone, an Austin, Texas, a start-up that is changing its name this week to Calxeda, plans to attack the market for supercomputers and other servers with a variant of the microprocessor technology from ARM Holdings PLC that is a mainstay in cellphones.

Chinese engineers developed homegrown communication circuitry for the Tianhe-1A system, and chips based on the Sparc technology that originated with Sun Microsystems Inc. They are planning to develop entirely original microprocessors to serve as the core calculating engines for future machines.

When that happens, China will be much less reliant on assistance from U.S. companies—and less vulnerable to U.S.-government export controls designed to restrict access to technology with military applications. "Those are things the U.S. needs to be concerned about," says José Muñoz, chief technology officer at the National Science Foundation, another U.S. agency involved in the exascale effort.

*ttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704514504575613711067275860.html