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U.S. Export Restrictions Lead to Chinese Homegrown Supercomputing Chips

posted by CoolHand on Thursday July 16 2015, @06:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the leveling-the-playing-field dept.

takyon writes a follow up from our story here:

The Platform reports that CPU export restrictions to Chinese supercomputing centers may have backfired. Tianhe-2 has remained the world's top supercomputer for the last five iterations of the TOP500 list using a heterogeneous architecture that mixes Intel's Xeon and Xeon Phi chips. Tianhe-2 will likely be upgraded to Tianhe-2A within the next year (rather than by the end of 2015 as originally planned), nearly doubling its peak performance from 54.9 petaflops to around 100 petaflops, while barely raising peak power usage. However, instead of using a new Intel Xeon Phi chip, a homegrown "China Accelerator" and novel architecture will be used.

A few details about the accelerator are known:

Unlike other [digital signal processor (DSP)] efforts that were aimed at snapping into supercomputing systems, this one is not a 32-bit part, but is capable of supporting 64-bit and further, it can also support both single (as others do) and double-precision. As seen below, the performance for both single and double precision is worth remarking upon (around 2.4 single, 4.8 double teraflops for one card) in a rather tiny power envelope. It will support high bandwidth memory as well as PCIe 3.0. In other words, it gives GPUs and Xeon Phi a run for the money—but the big question has far less to do with hardware capability and more to do with how the team at NUDT will be able to build out the required software stack to support applications that can gobble millions of cores on what is already by far the most core-dense machine on the planet.

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:24PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:24PM (#210113) Homepage Journal

    Mom hasn't dated any other men since Dad passed away 2003. She still wears her wedding ring.

    Care to elucidate?

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:35PM (#210120)

    Way to feed the troll.

  • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:52PM (#210136)

    Fucking != dating. I'd never be seen in public dating that hag bitch.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @11:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @11:49PM (#210239)

    Your dad died. Ha ha!

    - Nelson