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posted by takyon on Monday June 20 2016, @11:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the #2 dept.

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

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

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:

The system software includes Sunway Raise OS 2.0.5 based on Linux as the operating system. Dongarra's report also mentions basic compiler components, such as C/C++, and Fortran compilers, an automatic vectorization tool, and basic math libraries. Sunway OpenACC supports OpenACC 2.0.

The Chinese supercomputing leadership is targeting the new Sunway machine at four key areas: advanced manufacturing (CAE, CFD), earth system modeling and weather forecasting; life science, and big data analytics.

China has been called out in the past for putting hardware ahead of software development. China announced that is has (at least) three applications that are on the finalist list for the Gordon Bell Award, which will be announced at SC16. The accepted submissions include a fully-implicit nonhydrostatic dynamic solver for cloud-resolving atmospheric simulation; a highly effective global surface wave numerical simulation with ultra-high resolution; and a large scale phase-field simulation for coarsening dynamics based on Cahn-Hilliard equation with degenerated mobility. The report from Dongarra notes that all three applications have scaled to about 8 million cores, just under 80 percent of the total system.

The performance of the #500 system on the TOP500 list has risen from 206.3 to 285.9 teraflops. 94 systems now have an RMAX of over 1 petaflops, compared to 81 systems in November 2015.

More coverage of the list and Sunway is available at The Next Platform.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday June 21 2016, @01:34AM

    by Snotnose (1623) on Tuesday June 21 2016, @01:34AM (#363112)

    I worked for Qualcomm up until a few years ago. When they have a new chip coming out they have a new FFA designed around it. Don't remember what the FFA acronym was for but it was basically a phone with the newest baseband chip (Qualcomm), newest PMIC (Qualcomm), newest RF chip (Qualcomm) newest display (not Qualcomm), newest touchscreen (not Qualcomm), and random other parts (not Qualcomm). My job was to write new drivers for all these things so it would power up, display graphics, verify everything worked, essentially everything but make a call and get Android running on it.

    Outside of the QC chips all the documentation was in Korean or Chinese. If I was lucky they'd translated enough english so I could tell what the important registers were and how I should set them. If I was unlucky I got sample code with hardware addresses and values hardcoded, with the comments in Korean/Chinese.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 21 2016, @01:42AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday June 21 2016, @01:42AM (#363116) Journal

    I'm not sure what that has to do with China switching places with the U.S. on the TOP500 list, or China switching from Intel to a homegrown chip. Qualcomm chips aren't used in many supercomputers as far as I can tell, and I saw no mention of Qualcomm in the vendor/chip statistics:

    http://top500.org/statistics/overtime/ [top500.org]

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Tuesday June 21 2016, @03:21AM

      by Snotnose (1623) on Tuesday June 21 2016, @03:21AM (#363141)

      Point was every chip that wasn't Qualcomm was from Korea/China. That told me I should be glad I was close to retirement age, hence I'd be insulated from the titanic changes that were coming soon.

      --
      Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
      • (Score: 4, Informative) by anubi on Tuesday June 21 2016, @07:06AM

        by anubi (2828) on Tuesday June 21 2016, @07:06AM (#363179) Journal

        ...every chip that wasn't Qualcomm was from Korea/China. That told me I should be glad I was close to retirement age ...

        Me, too!

        I have worked my whole life in this stuff. Its the one thing I do pretty well. Analog/digital/microcontroller/power/thermal stuff.

        Been doing it since the days of RTL, DTL, TTL, ECL, and the 8080.

        Before that it was vacuum tubes, then latched onto solid state with the CK722, 2N107, and 2N167.

        I got to learn this stuff first being a radio-TV serviceman. I got to see how many people made things, and fix them.

        I do not see today's kids being exposed to nearly the kind of things I was exposed to. Not that I am a special snowflake, rather I was coming online during a special time in the life of America. A time where things were simple enough a kid could understand them if he took a mind to. Those old style cars, radios, TV's, and appliances were not all that complicated.

        That window was open for about 30 years, and I got the tail end of it.

        My take is the same as yours. The writing on the wall is pretty clear. This party is breaking up.

        To get to design level, one will need to have a good understanding of Chinese in order to read the technical literature on something.... just as the Chinese used to have to learn English in order to read the spec sheets. Soon, we will be getting the hobby-type stuff with no understanding of exactly what makes it work.

        If it breaks, few of us can fix it. And if it breaks on purpose, there is nothing much we can do about it. Have to go buy another and agree to whatever terms are dictated.

        That understanding is impeded by "intellectual property rights", pushed by my own country, because people were sharing music.

        I feel our Congress sold out our entire nation for a song... trying to protect artificially sustained monopolies at the expense of many for the benefit of a very few.

        Then trying to use proprietary rights as a method of snooping on everyone via backroom deals with rightsholders.

        China no longer needs us our technology.... all they need from us now is our willingness to go into debt to pay for what we should be making ourselves.

        Our own snake is coming back to bite us.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @07:31AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @07:31AM (#363181)

          emigrate, so my hypothetical children will get those opportunities and more.

          Unfortunately most of the alternatives look just as shitty as the US, and the ones that don't have health risks either political, legal, or biological.

          :(

          • (Score: 2) by ticho on Tuesday June 21 2016, @07:45AM

            by ticho (89) on Tuesday June 21 2016, @07:45AM (#363186) Homepage Journal

            I hear Mars is going to be a thing in next few decades... :)

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @12:11PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @12:11PM (#363266)

            If I had my druthers of anywhere on this planet... New Zealand.

            However, I seriously doubt they would take me. Too friggen old, not rich enough. I do not have enough to put on the table to make it worthwhile for them.

            If I were in their shoes, I would do the same. I would simply not take anyone that showed up.

            Unlike America, where we even take in troublemakers and women flocking in to drop anchor babies.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @08:16PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @08:16PM (#363517)

              >Unlike America, where we even take in troublemakers and women flocking in to drop anchor babies.

              Bitches love them badboys.

              America is a womans cunttree. What do you expect?

              It's frendly to women's interests (badboys, and women's solidarity) and unfriendly to "loser" (aka majority) MAAALLLELESSSSSSS interests (female children, guns, liberty etc)

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @08:13PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @08:13PM (#363516)

        >Point was every chip that wasn't Qualcomm was from Korea/China. That told me I should be glad I was close to retirement age, hence I'd be insulated from the titanic changes that were coming soon.

        America is a woman's cunt-tree who's greatest export is "girls not brides" and the bombs that go with it to make it a reality in the rest of the world.

        Oh and backdoors in everything (got to make the world safe for cunts and keep men in their place).