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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @08:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2016, @08:24PM (#363520)

    America is a woman's cuntry.

    Women will just fuck the invaders.
    While the mmmaaallleeesss are cut down.
    (good the mmaaallleeesss like young girls! Jesus hates them! (God of Deuteronomy does not hate them))