China Unveils Supercomputer Based on Its Own Microprocessor Chips

The declaration was prefabricated this hebdomad at a academic gathering held in Jinan, China, fashioned by business and polity organizations. The newborn machine, the Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in Sept at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, the top of Shandong Province in orient China.

The Sunway system, which crapper action most 1,000 1E+12 calculations per ordinal — a petaflop — module belike surpass among the 20 fastest computers in the world. solon significantly, it is imperturbable of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, fashioned at a Asiatic organisation create and manufactured in Shanghai.

Currently, the Asiatic are most threesome generations behindhand the state-of-art defect making technologies utilised by concern body much as the United States, South Korea, Nihon and Taiwan.

“This is a taste of a surprise,” said Jack Dongarra, a organisation individual at the University of river and a cheater of the Top500 project, a itemize of the world’s fastest computers.

Last fall, added Asiatic supported supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, created an planetary sentiency when it was shortly hierarchical as the world’s fastest, before it was displaced in the outflow by a competition Asian machine, the K Computer, fashioned by Fujitsu.

But the Tianhe was shapely from processor chips prefabricated by dweller companies, Intel and Nvidia, though its interior change grouping was fashioned by Asiatic organisation engineers. Similarly, the K organisation was supported on Sparc chips, fashioned at Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley.

Dr. Dongarra said the Sunway’s academic extreme action was most 74 proportionality as alacritous as the fastest United States organisation — the Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy artefact at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, prefabricated by Cray Inc. That organisation is currently the ordinal fastest on the list.

The Energy Department is thinking threesome supercomputers that would separate at 10 to 20 petaflops. And the United States is embarking on an try to accomplish an exaflop, or digit meg 1E+12 mathematical dealings in a second, sometime before the modify of the decade, though most organisation scientists feature the needed technologies do not still exist.

To physique much a organisation from existing components would order Brobdingnagian amounts of energy — roughly the turn produced by a medium-sized thermonuclear noesis plant.

In contrast, Dr. Dongarra said it was provocative that the noesis requirements of the newborn Asiatic supercomputer were relatively overmodest — most digit megawatt, according to reports from the academic conference. The Tianhe supercomputer consumes most quaternary megawatts and the Jaguar most seven.

The ShenWei microprocessor appears to be supported on whatever of the aforementioned organisation principles that are pet by Intel’s most modern microprocessors, according to individual supercomputer experts in the United States.

But there is difference over whether the machine’s chilling profession is pertinent for designs that module be required by the exaflop-class supercomputers of the future.

Photos of the newborn Sunway supercomputer expose an enlarge water-cooling grouping that haw be a momentous front in the organisation of the rattling fastest machines.

“Getting this chilling profession precise is very, rattling difficult,” said Steven Wallach, honcho individual at Convey Computer, a supercomputer concern supported in Richardson, Tex. “This tells me that this is a earnest design. This chilling profession could bit to exaflop. They are in the catch to win.”