This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
China: not one but two 100 Petaflop machines within a year?


Although the ‘Long March’ is a cornerstone of China’s contemporary history,


Tom Wilkie finds that the country’s march to


supercomputing dominance could be short and fast


Chinese-made processors, and both coming on stream about a year before the United States’ 100 Petaflop machines being developed under the Coral initiative. Ironically, the CPU for one machine appears


W


very similar to a technology abandoned by the USA in 2007, and the US Government, through its export embargo, has encouraged China to develop its own accelerator for the other machine. As reported on the Scientific Computing


World website, in a separate move to acquire mastery of microprocessor technologies, China’s state owned Tsinghua Unigroup has made a bid to acquire US semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology for $23 billion, in what could be one of the biggest acquisitions of a US company by a Chinese firm. In a further assertion of technological


ambition, China’s domestic HPC vendors were highly visible at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt in July where they talked to Scientific Computing World about their plans to expand overseas (see page 18). Highlighting the role reversal between China


and the USA, the Chinese computer company Inspur intends to open a US manufacturing


12 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD


ithin the next 12 months, China expects to be operating not one but two 100 Petaflop computers, each containing (different)


Currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-2 may be beaten to the 100 Petaflop mark by a different machine that uses China’s own ShenWei processor


plant this year. It is a contrast to the recent past, where once it was US companies who outsourced manufacturing to China. Inspur already has an R&D centre in San Jose, California. Meantime, another Chinese supercomputing


company, Sugon, is planning a trade mission to the UK in September of this year to find partners for its overseas expansion. It too has plans to invest overseas, to develop expertise in, and familiarity with, its systems and products. Huawei was also exhibiting at ISC High


Performance. It has, of course, long had a dominant position in the telecommunications business, but it has been expanding into cloud servers and more recently into HPC. Its cluster for the Alibaba Group in China ranks 115 in the current Top500. Now it too is seeking partnerships with distributors and integrators in Europe and North America. Also with a strong presence at the show was


Lenovo, which originally manufactured PCs, tablets, and mobile phones, and which acquired


IBM’s x86 server business last year, including not only the commercial computing but also the high-performance computing side. Lenovo marked that it had got serious about HPC when it opened a European technology centre in Stuttgart earlier this year. Te company sells its very high-end systems direct, but also has partnerships with integrators in Europe and around the world.


Chinese RISC processor Information in the public domain at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt in July suggested that China is developing a 100 Petaflop machine that will use its own CPU, designed in China. Te computer is expected to start operating before the middle of next year. Hitherto, international attention has


focused on the Tianhe-2 computer developed by the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) and sited at the National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou, largely because it retained its position as the world’s


@scwmagazine l www.scientific-computing.com


National University of Defence Technology


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40