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takyon writes:

The June 2015 edition of the Green500 supercomputer list is finally out, and the top system, Shoubu at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Japan, has surpassed the 7 gigaflops per watt milestone. The following two systems surpassed 6 GFLOPS/W, and the current #4 system led the November 2014 list at 5.272 GFLOPS/W.

Shoubu is ranked #160 on the June 2015 edition of the TOP500 list, with an RMAX of 412.7 teraflops. Green500 reports its efficiency at 7,031.58 MFLOPS/W with a power consumption of 50.32 kW. The supercomputer uses Intel Xeon E5-2618Lv3 Haswell CPUs, "new many-core accelerators from PEZY-SC," and the InfiniBand data interconnect. The top 32 systems on the new Green500 list are heterogeneous, using GPU and "many-core" accelerators from the likes of AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and PEZY Computing. The PEZY-SC accelerator used in the top 3 systems reportedly delivers 1.5 teraflops of double-precision floating-point performance using 1024 cores built on a 28nm process, while consuming just 90 W.

Green500 notes Japanese dominance in the supercomputer efficiency rankings. Aside from Shoubu at RIKEN, the #2 and #3 systems are located at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. Eight of the top twenty systems on the newest Green500 list are located in Japan.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

HPCwire reports on an analysis of the November 2015 TOP500 Supercomputer list by co-creator Dr. Erich Strohmaier showing "nothing wrong with Moore's Law". Strohmaier examined China's jump in installed systems and performance growth trends.

China's surge is mainly attributed to "surprise company" Sugon, which submitted smaller sytems. It achieved 3rd place in vendor market share, but just 7th in terms of installed performance, with 21 petaflops. Strohmaier says that Sugon was new to supercomputing and took the time and energy to run the LINPACK benchmark across all systems, "regardless of how well or badly they run and gave us the number". Lenovo became a Chinese company, and some "artifact" systems were labelled Lenovo/IBM or IBM/Lenovo. Strohmaier also pointed to Inspur with 15 systems.

Strohmaier identifies two inflection points in TOP500 performance development. The growth trajectory dips in 2008 and 2014, showing the effects of financial and technology changes. Turnover has decreased since 2008, with 1.27 year old systems before 2008 and roughly 3 year old systems today. However, by filtering out systems with NVIDIA and Xeon Phi coprocessors, Strohmaier identified an Rmax/socket trend that continues to follow Moore's Law and is the product of the average number of cores per socket and the performance per core. Since the performance per socket continues to increase at an exponential rate, it is the lack of growth in total number of sockets that explains TOP500 stagnation. "So it's clearly a technological reason, but it's not a reason on a chip, it's actually a reason on the facility and system level that is most likely related to either power or money or both."

[More after the break.]

takyon writes:

The TOP500 and Green500 lists, measuring the fastest and most power efficient supercomputers respectively, are to be "merged" beginning in June 2016:

The TOP500 and Green500 lists will continue to remain separate, but all submission data will now be collected via a single online portal at http://top500.org/submit. Submission instructions are to be found on both the TOP500 and Green500 sites. The joint power submission rules are now online.

Going forward, the ISC Group will host and maintain the web presence of Green500, which is currently undergoing a re-design to reflect the integration. The new site will be officially launched at the ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt, Germany this June. The 47th TOP500 list, and the 19th Green500 list, will be presented in a historical ceremony during this year's conference opening session.

While the TOP500 list has included estimated supercomputer power consumption for years, allowing you to perform a FLOPS/Watt calculation, the Green500 list has apparently used a different set of stricter rules. Both lists will now use the same joint power submission rules.

The integration of the two lists reflects the growing importance of power efficiency in supercomputing. The ideal target for the first 1 exaflops supercomputing systems is around 20-25 megawatts, but the first system may end up with a total power consumption of around 35 megawatts.

Here's our November 2015 TOP500 and Green500 reporting.

Original Submission

Chinese supercomputer is the world's fastest — and without using US chips.

anubi writes:

China now has a greater share of the world's fastest supercomputers than the US.

We just got through discussing about how Intel's Hardware Rootkit is used for providing remote access services to interested third parties that may want to have some say as to what you use your machine for...

From the article:

The Sunway TaihuLight takes the top spot from previous record-holder Tianhe-2 (also located in China), and more than triples the latter's speed. The new number one is capable of performing some 93 quadrillion calculations per second (otherwise known as petaflops) and is roughly five times more powerful than the speediest US system, which is now ranked third worldwide.

[...] The previous fastest supercomputer, China's Tianhe-2, was built using US-made Intel processors. There were plans to upgrade the Tianhe-2's performance last year, but in April 2015 the US government placed an export ban on all high-performance computing chips to China.

So, while we were backloading our stuff with backdoors, the Chinese are leapfrogging us, and leave the United States government shaking the hand of executives who outsourced our technical jobs. Hope it was a good hand shake.

I am already finding a lot of datasheets for very interesting chips I use for my Arduino stuff... things like very high precision ADC's and DAC's - available in native Chinese. Most of the time an English translation ( Google translator quality ) is available. I am getting used to the idea that the new high tech is apt to require an understanding of Chinese to read it.

This is gonna be interesting to see how this plays out when China develops weaponry surpassing that controlled by the USA.

China's New Supercomputer Uses a 260-Core Chip

takyon writes:

HPCWire received a report about Sunway TaihuLight, the world's new #1 supercomputer system on the June 2016 TOP500 list, in advance, and has some details about its architecture. The system uses the native/homegrown SW26010 "manycore" processor instead of Intel's similar Xeon Phi chips. Each SW26010 has 260 cores divided into four groups, with 64 compute cores and a single "management core" in each group. The chip reaches about 3 teraflops of peak floating point performance, and can access 8 GB [CORRECTION: 32 GB] of DDR3 memory. There are 40,960 of these chips, for a total of 10,649,600 cores (10,485,760 compute cores). The system's efficiency is around 6.05 gigaflops per Watt, over three times more efficient than the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. Although the TOP500 and Green500 lists are due to merge, the Green500 list has not been published yet. As for what the system will be used for:

takyon writes:

The founder, President, and CEO of PEZY Computing, Motoaki Saito, has been arrested for allegedly defrauding the Japanese government:

The head of Japanese supercomputing firm PEZY Computing was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of defrauding a government institution of 431 million yen (~$3.8 million). According to reports in the Japanese press, PEZY founder, president and CEO Motoaki Saito and another PEZY employee, Daisuke Suzuki, are charged with profiting from padded claims they submitted to the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

On the 21st Green500 list, the top three most efficient supercomputers as well as the #5 most efficient supercomputer all use PEZY-SC2 "manycore" chips.

Previously: PEZY's Next Many-Core Chip Will Include a MIPS 64-Bit CPU
TOP500 Analysis Shows "Nothing Wrong with Moore's Law" and the November 2015 Green500 List
Shoubu Continues to Lead June 2016 Green500 List, World's Fastest Supercomputer Comes in at #3

Original Submission