Intel-based system is more than twice the speed of any system in the U.S., and has China poised to take the global lead in Top500 supercomputing list
Posted on 06/03/2013 1:51:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
China has produced a supercomputer capable of 54.9 petaflops, more than twice the speed of any system in the U.S., according to a U.S. researcher who was in China last week and learned the details.
China's latest system was built with Intel chips, but includes indigenously produced Chinese technologies as well. The Chinese government spent about $290 million on it.
[ Also on InfoWorld: Supercomputers face growing resilience problems. | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter. ]
Today, the world's fastest supercomputer is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Cray system was running at nearly 18 petaflops, according to last November's biannual Top 500 list. That list will be updated in mid-June.
With its new supercomputer, China is raising the stakes in supercomputing for the U.S., as well as for Japan and Europe. It is showing a willingness to push for leadership in HPC and the race to develop the next generation of systems, exascale.
Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top 500 supercomputing list, posted a detailed description late Sunday of China's latest system ( report PDF ) from his trip to China. His findings are based on a briefing at an HPC conference May 28-29 in Changsha by a Chinese official from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT).
HPC Wire reported on the new system this weekend.
China's latest large system is the successor to its Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which won the global title as the world's fastest in November 2010. President Obama made note of China's supercomputing accomplishment in his state of the union speech in January, 2011, where he said the U.S. was facing another " Sputnik moment" in wide range of technologies.
China's latest supercomputer, called Tianhe-2 or Milkyway-2, has 32,000 multicore Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge chips, and 48,000 Xeon Phi chips, a co-processor based on Intel's MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture.
Each Phi processor is capable of more than teraflop of speed, or one trillion floating point operations per second. A petaflop is 1,000 teraflops, or one quadrillion floating-point operations per second. An exascale system is 1,000 petaflops.
Dongarra's report suggests that China may have the leading system for some time. "The next large acquisition of a supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy will not be until 2015," he wrote.
China has been developing its own chip technology and has been mixing and matching homegrown tech with imported components. U.S. researchers believe China is heading in the direction of building a supercomputer made entirely of indigenously produced components, including chips.
The approach of combing China-built technology with American products, is evident in Tiahne-2.
"There are number of features of the Tianhe-2 that are Chinese in origin, unique and interesting," said Dongarra, in his report. These include a proprietary interconnects, and the Galaxy FT-15, a 16-core processor. He cited the "apparent reliability and scalability" of the system as well.
The system's power usage, when cooling is considered, is 24 MWs. Power is major issue in achieving exascale. Researchers could assemble, theoretically, an exascale computing system with current technology. But at a billion or so cores, it would need its own power plant to operate.
To reach exascale, HPC researchers say they need to develop processors, memory and network components that substantially reduce power use. New programming models are also being developed. The problems in achieving exascale are such that Europe, which is investing heavily in its own HPC effort, believes there is a potential to leapfrog the U.S. if breakthrough approaches are discovered to some of these problems.
U.S. researchers, as recently as last month, warned Congress that the U.S., while the undisputed leader in HPC today, is at risk of falling behind in HPC development unless it commits hundreds of millions of dollars to exascale research. But the ongoing budget dispute and sequestration is leading to a reduction in R&D spending.
China wants to produce an exascale system before 2020. The U.S., at its present effort, won't produce an exascale system until around 2025, lawmakers were told last month.
Under Obama-the-Undocumented Moslem Tyrant who hates
the US Constitution, the American superlative position
in computers, space, and now medicine will be crushed.
And HE will be happy.
Good gaming system.
So, have we stolen it yet?
Couldn’t have had anything to do with IBM shipping all this technology over there.
Or their theft of trade secrets through hacking.
I guess the good news is they can calculate really fast but they’ll still be hungry in an hour.
RE: he American superlative position
in computers, space, and now medicine will be crushed.
______________________________________
For those who don’t remember... prior to the November 2012 elections, Dinesh D’ Souza actually produced and showed a movie (documentary) nationwide entitled: 2016: OBAMA’s AMERICA.
In this documentary, D’Souza contends that Obama’s earlier life, following his childhood from Hawaii to Indonesia and a visit to Kenya (Obama’s father’s birthplace) has caused him to subscribe “to an ideology that sees America very differently.” D’Souza asserts that Obama’s father’s Kenyan roots in particular have inspired the President “to shrink America’s footprint in the world because he thinks we’ve been stepping on the world.”
D’Souza contends that Obama’s long term plan is to “equalize” America with the rest of the world so that we don’t become too dominant ( much like his desire to equalize everyone else here in the USA by bringing down the wealthy ).
I'm no hardware guy but it looks like it's a matter of components rather than technological advance. I say again.. When are the Chi-Coms going to pay the rest of what they owe us?
United States Free Enterprise, INC.
INVOICE
Your U.S. Treasury certificates are your payment receipts. Thank you.
.. or if you prefer, when is the Communist Party going to compensate the families of those 60 million citizens they killed over the past 70 years?
This is a recent list of the computers which appeared at the top of the TOP500 list, and the "Peak speed" is given as the "Rmax" rating. For more historical data see History of supercomputing.
| Year | Supercomputer | Peak speed (Rmax) |
Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | IBM Roadrunner | 1.026 PFLOPS | Los Alamos, USA |
| 1.105 PFLOPS | |||
| 2009 | Cray Jaguar | 1.759 PFLOPS | Oak Ridge, USA |
| 2010 | Tianhe-IA | 2.566 PFLOPS | Tianjin, China |
| 2011 | Fujitsu K computer | 10.51 PFLOPS | Kobe, Japan |
| 2012 | IBM Sequoia | 16.32 PFLOPS | Livermore, USA |
| 2012 | Cray Titan | 17.59 PFLOPS | Oak Ridge, USA |
Sequoia was the world's fastest supercomputer at 16.32 petaflops, consuming 7890.0 kW, until October 29, 2012 when Titan went online.[73][74]
Pretty significant jump from there to 54.9
Those were INTEL CHIPS the Chinese used.
So much for that ‘sputnik’ moment, eh?
should mirror FR on it and see if it holds up on the 2016 election night live thread
The real leadership of America, the globalists, are fine with this, since they manage capital that is invested all over the world, including China. And they manage key political advisors in the governments of the world.
They will, however, happily use the news as a political lever to induce their personal representatives in Congress to give them some free taxpayer money.
The US government needs to “win the computer race”, ya know.
Geo-political struggles are the stock in trade of globalists.
How much is 54.9 quadrillion floating-point operations per Chicom second in units of floating-point operations per standard second.
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