Chinese Supercomputer Wrests Title From U.S.

[Molawchai]

BBC News - China claims supercomputer crown 28 October 2010

The Tianhe-1A supercomputer is about 50% faster than its closest rival.

China has claimed the top spot on the list of the world's supercomputers.

The title has gone to China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer that is capable of carrying out more than 2.5 thousand trillion calculations a second.

To reach such high speeds the machine draws on more than 7,000 graphics processors and 14,000 Intel chips.

The claim to be the fastest machine on the planet has been ratified by the Top 500 Organisation which maintains a list of the most powerful machines.

High power

China's Tianhe-1A (Milky Way) has taken over the top spot from America's XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee that can carry out only 1.75 petaflops per second. One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
The news about the machine broke just before the publication of the biennial Top 500 Supercomputer list which ranks the world's most powerful machines.

Prof Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, one of the computer scientists who helps to compile the list, said China's claim was legitimate.

"This is all true," he told BBC News. "I was in China last week and talked with the designers, saw the system, and verified the results."

He added: "I would say it's 47% faster than the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's machine, 1.7 Pflops (ORNL system) to 2.5 Pflops (Chinese system)."

Tianhe-1A is unusual in that it unites thousands of Intel processors with thousands of graphics cards made by Nvidia.

The chips inside graphics cards are typically made up of small arithmetical units that can carry out simple sums very quickly. By contrast, Intel chips are typically used to carry out more complicated mathematical operations.

The machine houses its processors in more than 100 fridge-sized cabinets and together these weigh more than 155 tonnes.

Based in China's National Center for Supercomputing in the city of Tianjin, the computer has already started to do work for the local weather service and the National Offshore Oil Corporation.

 

[humanfirst]

A great achievement..congrats china.

 

[noksss]

Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited... in the energy-related (that's why power-cut is the norm in India where 24*7 power is non-existant? ) and infrastructure sector (that's why india is famous for its world-class infrastructure? ) which includes Power ( yeah, chest-thumping Power! ) , Railways (you mean that one where people sitting on top of "trains" and even more people pooping below them along rail tracks? ) , Telecom (pleeeez...), Transmission and Distribution ( transmission, eh? yeah right )

So Bharat is the "brain" behind India's "world class IT", or Jenny is?

You know Jenny, right? "Good morning. This is Jennifer *ahem* speaking. How could i help you today? " rings the bell?

U can make fun 100 times if u want to but we dont care and our goverment is spending some $1trillion in infrastructure upgrade
in the coming years

Airtel,Aircel,Reliance ? only are phone service providers?

TEJAS? Is that the one has sth to do with that world class airplane of yours on the drawingboard as well? Then i feel sorry for North Amercian clients since the delivering date may well be 2070 even though the sale is made today...

Oh god i am not refering to our Tejas LCA Aircraft there is also a company called Tejas which sells mobile technology So go through the link and post ur crap

we are talking about India's "IT". Which part of those keywords you don't understand?

He talked about router not Indian IT so which part u dont understand

 

[peaceful]

U can make fun 100 times if u want to but we dont care and our goverment is spending some $1trillion in infrastructure upgrade
in the coming years

the regime that once promised that mumbai would catch up with shanghai in 5 years?

1 trillion usd? where are they going to get the money?

printing more money?

 

[peaceful]

He talked about router not Indian IT so which part u dont understand

I argued that india doesn't have a real IT industry. because india coding monkeys can only program java and playing with mysql + tomcat.

and what make it worse is they are not even good at it.

If you can't understand this, then you just need to walk away.

 

[xukxuk]

1 trillion usd?
if it's rupee then...
1 trillion rupee
equel to usd 25.5 billion
that's really not a lot of money for whole country Infrastructure
shanghai to hangzhou high speed train cost close to 5 billion usd

 

[Hafizzz]

Is China a supercomputer threat?
Is China a supercomputer threat? (Q&A) | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

With China expected to officially take the supercomputer performance crown next month, I asked an expert about the state of supercomputing in the U.S. and whether China poses a long-term threat to the United States' current preeminence in supercomputing.

Nvidia announced yesterday that its chips are powering the "Tianhe-1A" Chinese supercomputer that achieved 2.507 petaflops, beating a U.S.-based system that is currently ranked No. 1 on the June Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The Chinese system is a unique hybrid design that uses approximately 7,000 Nvidia graphics chips along with 14,000 Intel Xeon CPUs. The graphics chips are what give the system the extra oomph to catapult it into the top supercomputer spot.

I spoke with Jack Dongarra, university distinguished professor at University of Tennessee's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and part of a group from the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Georgia Tech that recently purchased a hybrid system. It is important to note that Oak Ridge houses the supercomputer, dubbed "Jaguar," cited above that is currently ranked No. 1 in the world based on the Top500 June list: it is not a hybrid system.

Q: Does Oak Ridge have anything analogous to the Chinese hybrid system?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge has a small version of a machine that is hybrid in nature. So, this is an acquisition that just took place...out of a grant from the National Science Foundation. It involved Oak Ridge National Labs, University of Tennessee, and Georgia Tech. But it's much, much smaller than the Chinese system. The machine is in place and testing is being carried out at Oak Ridge. A node has two Intel Westmere chips and three Nvidia Fermi boards. There are 120 nodes in the system.

What makes the Chinese supercomputer so fast?
Dongarra: The Chinese designed their own interconnect. It's not commodity. It's based on chips, based on a router, based on a switch that they produce.

Is that in essence the secret sauce?
Dongarra: It's similar to Cray. Cray's contribution, besides the integration and software, is the interconnect network. They have a very fast interconnect that makes that machine perform very well. Though [the Chinese] project is based on U.S. processors, it uses a Chinese interconnect. That's the interesting part. They've put something together that is roughly twice the bandwidth of an InfiniBand interconnect [which is used widely in the U.S.]

Will the Chinese system in fact take the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list in November?
Dongarra: Yes. I saw the machine. I saw the output. It's the real thing.

Why doesn't Oak Ridge do what the Chinese are doing?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge doesn't have the ability or technology to develop an interconnect or a router. We don't make computers. We buy computers and use them. It's not within our scope or mission to be in the computer design business.

What's your advice?
Dongarra: You have to remember that you have to not only invest in the hardware. It's like a race car. In order to run the race car, you need a driver. You need to effectively use the machine. And we need to invest in various levels within the supercomputer ecology. The ecology is made up of the hardware, the operating system, the compiler, the applications, the numerical libraries, and so on. And you have to maintain an investment across that whole software stack in order to effectively use the hardware. And that's an aspect that sometimes we forget about. It's underfunded. We fund the hardware but we don't fund the other components. The ecosystem tends to get out of balance because the hardware tends to run far ahead of what we can develop in terms of software. We have machines that have a tremendous level of parallelism. We currently have a very crude way of doing programming.

Who would do that?
Dongarra: The research is performed under the auspices of the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.

Is this a red flag for the U.S.?
Dongarra: Yes, this is a wake-up call. We need to realize that other countries are capable of doing this. We're losing an advantage.

Sour grape American labels China's success a threat.

 

[Speeder 2]

No need to bash

oops...sorry but I've left my machine gun at home...

can i borrow one from you?

 

[Speeder 2]

You have greatly mistaken their contributions:

Dham assisted with the development of Pentium at Intel. He did not do so anywhere near Indian borders. Furthermore, i486 was by far the largest breakthrough in CPU, not Pentium. Pentium family processors were merely commercial processors made more cost efficient to mass produce. Therefore, his contributions pertained to the technologies related to cost cutting, not peformance improvment.

As for Bhatia, first he was educated and employed respectively at Stanford University, US and Apple, US, not India. Second, he wasn't the sole, but co-inventor of Hotmail, along with Jack Smith. Webmail programs in the 1990s were as common as toilet paper today. However, what Bhatia was clever on was to make hotmail free (common practice to promote low tech products), which then rose in popularity. What MS wanted to buy wasn't the technology, but the user base. Moreover, Hotmail became popular not before but only after Microsoft's acquisition which then had it intergrated into the MS networking system. And as Windows became the dominate OS towards the late 1990s with Windows 98, so did Hotmail.

While I understand that these are great personal achievements, I do not understand why you are proud of people who contribute to the United States in the United States. The supercomputer in stark contrast, contributes to China in China.

Lastly, Is it me or did you actually say that "Pentium ran on 90% of all computers?" Intel stands at 80% of the global CPU market. And most of that share are in chip sets, specifically designed for portable devices which are completely different from Pentium both in size and architecture. Furthermore, the newer Core brand has a totally distinct architecture. Why are you making this up?

I'm not saying that supercomputers are high-tech, but your examples to debunk the technology behind supercomputers are both irrelevant and false.

I cound't put it better.

Hotmail was only a service provider, not even a mid-tech firm back then.

The only advantage Hotmail got was being a early-mover by having a sizeble user base as it was for free. That's it. Domino Pizza not that far from my apartment here was also a early-mover, offering "buy 1, 1 free" with a sizeble "user" base too.

Indians are so proud of Hotmail, yet what's the difference between Domino Pizza, or Burger King etc, and Hotmail?

 

[ThatDamnGood]

Indians are so proud of Hotmail, yet what's the difference between Domino Pizza, or Burger King etc, and Hotmail?

Never used Hotmail, have ISP mail...

 

[prototype]

Congrats China,does not matter from were CPU and GPU came,what matter's is it is built in China

Once again congrats

 

[Malik Usman]

Building a super computer is easy, but harnessing its power is very difficult.

Hope China is able to put it to a good use to benefit the mankind

building a super computer is easy.....really.......i am surprised.

 

[somebozo]

Does this super computer means China's next fighters, rockets and weapon systems will be much more deadlier??

 

[siegecrossbow]

Does this super computer means China's next fighters, rockets and weapon systems will be much more deadlier??

I believe that aircraft design is one of Tianhe's functions. This will facilitate the design process (perform millions of simulations and save millions of manhours) but breakthroughs in material science and other areas are also needed to make China's next fighter more deadly.

 

[Super Falcon]

do pakistan has any supercomputer or not