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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

New information has emerged about China's exascale plans [hpcwire.com], which are a part of China's 13th five-year plan for 2016-2020. Despite U.S.-imposed export restrictions on processors, two 100 petaflops systems will be launched sometime during 2016, possibly as soon as the 2016 International Supercomputing Conference in June [soylentnews.org]. One of these systems will be an upgrade to Tianhe-2, and both may utilize homegrown accelerators [soylentnews.org].

At least one exascale prototype system will be built prior to a 1 exaflops system:

The exascale prototype will be about 512 nodes, offering 5-10 teraflops-per-node, 10-20 Gflops/watt, point to point bandwidth greater than 200 Gbps. MPI latency should be less than 1.5 µs, said [Beihang University Professor Depei] Qian. Development will also include system software and three typical applications that will be used to verify effectiveness. From there, work will begin on an efficient computing node and a scheme for high-performance processor/accelerator design.

"Based on those key technology developments, we will finally build the exascale system," said Qian. "Our goal is not so ambitious – it is to have exaflops in peak. We are looking for a LINPACK efficiency of greater than 60 percent. Memory is rather limited, about 10 petabytes, with exabyte levels of storage. We don't think we can reach the 20 megawatts system goal in less than five years so our goal is about 35 megawatts for the system; that means 30 Gflops/watt energy efficiency. The expected interconnect performance is greater than 500 Gbps."

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