According to the report, the country is downplaying its supercomputing capabilities. China could have crossed the exascale barrier twice already.
According to The Next Platform, the country is secretly running the world’s two most powerful supercomputers. It is the first to run systems capable of more than one exaflop (1018 floating-point operations per second).
Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer, which is capable of 442 petaflops, currently holds the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
TNP claims that the Sunway “Oceanlite” supercomputer is housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, citing an anonymous source.
This system is the successor to China’s most powerful supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight. Ocean life was tested to the Linpack benchmark in March, and it achieved 1.3 exaflops peak performance and 1.05 sustained performance at 35MW power consumption.
The new supercomputer is being used for quantum simulation, among other things, and further research is expected to be announced soon. It’s thought to have 42 million Chinese chip cores.
At the same time, China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) has a supercomputer capable of similar performance, though its power consumption is unknown. The FeiTeng chips used in the Tianhe-3 supercomputer were developed after US trade sanctions prevented China from acquiring Intel Xeon Phi processors.
In March, the new system was also benchmarked. Phytium and Sunway were added to a list of Chinese companies sanctioned by the US government the following month. Phytium has been cut off from TSMC, a chip manufacturer.
What is Sunway Taihu Light?
The Sunway TaihuLight is a Chinese supercomputer that ranks third in the TOP500 list as of November 2018, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name translates to “divine power” and “Taihu Lake’s light.” The previous Tianhe-2, which ran at 34 petaflops, was nearly three times faster. With an efficiency of 6.051 GFlops/watt, it is the 16th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the Green500 as of June 2017. It is housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China, and was designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC).
According to the TOP500 lists, the Sunway TaihuLight was the world’s fastest supercomputer for two years, June 2016 to June 2018. IBM’s Summit surpassed the previous record in June 2018.
The Sunway TaihuLight has 40,960 SW26010 manycore 64-bit RISC processors based on the Sunway architecture, which was designed in China. For a total of 10,649,600 CPU cores across the entire system, each processor chip contains 256 processing cores and four additional cores for system management (also RISC cores, but more fully-featured).
Instead of a traditional cache hierarchy, the processing cores have 64 KB of scratchpad memory for data (and 16 KB for instructions) and communicate via a network on a chip.
The system is powered by Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5, a Linux-based operating system. To aid code parallelization, the system has its own customized implementation of OpenACC 2.0.
According to the school of computing at the National University of Defense Technology, China’s first exascale supercomputer should be operational by 2020. (NUDT). During the 13th Five-Year-Plan period (2016–2020), the country was supposed to develop an exascale computer, according to the national plan for the next generation of high-performance computers.
The project is being developed by the Tianjin Binhai New Area government, NUDT, and the Tianjin National Supercomputing Center. [10] It’s expected that the investment will total 3 billion yuan ($470.6 million).
It’s unclear why China hasn’t made the two supercomputers public, even though Top500 ranks major systems twice a year.
The United States is about to launch its own exascale system, dubbed the world’s first exascale supercomputer. Frontier will be the new world’s most powerful supercomputer, with 1.5 exaflops (likely 1.3 sustained performance).
The installation of the 29MW system is currently underway. The Aurora supercomputer will join it in the United States, which has been delayed several times, and the El Capitan system, which will be released in 2024.
All these systems may seem insignificant compared to China’s ‘Futures’ program, which aims to develop a 20 exaflops system by 2025, according to TNP’s source.
