high-performance computing ➤
of Chinese-designed processors into the commercial marketplace for servers. His thoughts were echoed in a separate
interview with Xiaoyang Niu, product manager of Inspur’s server product department. Niu also observed that there are already chipset manufacturers in China, mainly for mobile and embedded applications. Although he conceded that some manufacturers may wish to use domestically produced chips in their servers, like Sugon’s Wang he did not expect an imminent deployment in the commercial server space: ‘We do not have a clear road map for that,’ he said.
Supercomputing centres in China Te next-generation ShenWei machine is being developed at the Jiangnan Institute of Computer Technology which is located at the Wuxi Taihu New City Science and Education Industrial Park (K-PARK). Tis was established in April 2006 as a hi-tech industrial incubator and in addition to the Institute, it hosts companies and centres specialising in soſtware and service outsourcing, television animation, micro-nano sensor, creative design, network economy, high-end R&D and educational training. Wuxi is one of six National Supercomputing
Centres in China: l Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton), the site of Tianhe‐2;
l Wuxi, not far from Shanghai, which will be the location of the next-generation ShenWei;
l Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in south-central China, which hosts a Tianhe‐1A machine;
l Tianjin, one of China’s largest cities, sited near the coast to the south-east of Beijing, which also hosts a Tianhe‐1A machine;
l Jinan, the capital of Shandong province in Eastern China, south of Tianjin and south- east of Beijing, where the current ShenWei Bluelight is located; and
l Shenzhen, in Guangdong Province just north of Hong Kong, where Nebulae, the Dawning TC3600 Blade System (also known as the Dawning‐6000) operates.
US embargo on four machines and one university Te US Government has banned Intel (or any other US company) from exporting to the three National Supercomputing Centres in Changsha, Guangzhou, and Tianjin, together with the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT). All four have been placed on the US ‘Entity list’, meaning that the centres and the university have been ‘determined by the US Government to be acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.’ Te US Government
14 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD The National University of Defence Technology designed and built the Tianhe-2
statement goes on to say that ‘Te Tianhe–1A and Tianhe–2 supercomputers are believed to be used in nuclear explosive activities.’ Tis has been denied by Professor Yutong Lu, deputy chief designer of the Tianhe project in an interview with Scientific Computing World. Te National University of Defence
Technology (NUDT) is located in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. Its computer department, the first in China, was established in 1966 and expanded and renamed as the School of Computer Science in 1999. Now
THE DESIGN OF
CHINA’S CHIP APPEARS TO RESEMBLE THE ‘ALPHA’ RISC CHIP DISCONTINUED IN 2007 BY HP
with more than 400 staff, it created the first supercomputer in China, in 1983; the first GFlops machine in 1992; and the first TFlops system in 2000, as well as the Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-2 systems. Te Changsha National Supercomputing
Centre is located on the campus of Hunan University and was a joint venture by the Provincial Government, Hunan University and the NUDT. Construction of the new building started in November 2010 at a cost of around $112 million (700 million Yuan) and it began operations officially on 4 November 2014, at a total estimated cost of 860 million Yuan ($140.65 million). It operates a Tianhe-1A (with Nvidia GPUs as the accelerator) with a peak performance of 1.34 PFlops. Te Tianjin National Supercomputing
Centre predates the one at Changsha, having been approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology in May 2009, and constructed through a collaboration of Tianjin Binhai New Area (TBNA) and the NUDT. It hosts China’s
first Petaflops computer, the Tianhe-1 (also with Nvidia GPUs as accelerators) which now has a peak performance of 4.7 Petaflops and now claims to be providing high-performance computing services for more than 300 customers. Te Tianjin Binhai New Area is a Special Economic Zone and is intended to replicate development seen in Shenzhen and Pudong in Shanghai. Located on the coast of the Bohai Sea, the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea, and to the east of Tianjin’s main urban area, there are 11 large cities within a 500-kilometre radius, each with a population of more than one million people. Te National Supercomputer Centre in
Guangzhou is located on the East Campus of Sun Yat-sen University in the Higher Education Mega Centre, Guangzhou, and is jointly sponsored by Guangdong Province, Guangzhou city, Sun Yat-sen University, and the National University of Defence Technology, with a total capital investment of US$400 million. Te project started in November 2011, and in October 2013, the first phase of Tianhe-2 supercomputer was relocated from Changsha to Guangzhou. An upgrade programme started in July 2014. In addition to being the site of the world’s fastest computer, the Tianhe-2, the centre is also host to a Tianhe-1A machine which, at 211.7 TFlops sustained performance, is currently ranked 359 on the Top500.
The fifth Tianhe system In fact, there are five Tianhe systems listed in the current Top500. As just described, two are in Guangzhou, and one each in Tianjin and Hunan. Te fiſth is in the Cloud Computing Centre in LivLiang (also sometimes written as Lüliang or Lyuliang) a city of nearly four million inhabitants in the west of Shanxi province, some 500 km south west of Beijing. Tis ranks number 30 in the overall list, with a sustained performance of around 2 PFlops. It is powered by Intel Xeon E5 processors and Xeon Phi co- processors. l
@scwmagazine l
www.scientific-computing.com
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