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No sign of China’s new supercomputers among world’s Top500
- Chinese developers of the new systems have not officially submitted details to the list organisers
- US Frontier system tops the rankings but China still has the highest number overall
Published: 10:30pm, 3 Jun, 2022
The absence of new Chinese supercomputers from a list of the world’s 500 fastest systems amounts to a major gap in the rankings, according to a co-founder of the Top500.
“The missing Chinese machines affect the Top500 list and alter the historical information that the list conveys,” said Jack Dongarra, distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee in the United States.
“We know they exist, and research papers have been written about using these systems. We understand their competent performance, but nothing has been officially submitted.”
Twice a year since 1993, the Germany-based ranking group has released its list of the powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world.
China used to actively take part in the rankings but has become more reluctant to share supercomputing information in recent years because of “trade frictions” with the US, according to a Chinese scientist involved in the project.
The scientist, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said China’s supercomputing research institutions had “indefinitely halted” providing data to the Top500, including on supercomputing development and performance.
Washington has put at least 12 Chinese entities associated with supercomputing on an export blacklist, including Beijing-based manufacturer Sugon and the National Supercomputing Centre in the eastern city of Wuxi, the developer of the once-dominant Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer.
Zhou Yu, a professor of geography at Vassar College in New York, who researches globalisation and the hi-tech industry in China, said it was unclear if there was a top-down command for Chinese institutions to take part in international computer rankings because some universities still sent data to the rating bodies.
“It would be bad for Chinese supercomputer companies to stop sharing data because it provides no transparency and also will reduce the competitive pressure,” she said. “But we should not jump to conclusions at the moment and wait to see similar incidents.”
The US Frontier system topped the latest Top500 released on Monday and is the first supercomputer on the list to record 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second, known as exascale computing.
China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which topped the list in 2016 and 2017, was sixth this time, while the Tianhe 2A, the fastest from 2013 to 2015, came in ninth. The country still has the most supercomputers on the latest list, with 173 systems compared with the US’ 126.
Frontier is capable of 10 times more calculations per second than the Sunway TaihuLight, which topped the list six years ago with 93 quadrillion calculations per second.
China has since completed prototypes of three exascale computers: the New Generation Sunway exascale supercomputer, the Tianhe 3, and one from Sugon, a supercomputer developer backed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
However, China only shares limited information about these computers, publicly disclosing fewer details than the Top500 list requires so it is difficult to determine the capacity of the machines today.
To join the rankings, a computer operator needs to run a calculation known as the Linpack benchmark and submit the results to its website, according to Dongarra, who introduced the benchmark.
“So far, we have not received the benchmark runs from the Sunway OceanLight and Tianhe 3. So, their performance remains a mystery,” he said.
“I hope the Top500 benchmark results [from Chinese machines] are submitted so we can track the advancement of high-performance computing around the world and in China.”
No sign of China’s new supercomputers among world’s Top500
Chinese developers of the new systems have not officially submitted details to the list organisers.
www.scmp.com
