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high-performance computing


No. 1 system for the fiſth consecutive time when the most recent Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced in the middle of July. However, the first Chinese machine to reach


100 Petaflops may be one being developed by the Jiangnan Institute of Computer Technology in Wuxi, near Shanghai. It will use a next-generation, Chinese designed and manufactured, ShenWei chip. A ShenWei processor, the SW1600, currently powers the Sunway BlueLight, which is already in operation at the National Supercomputer Centre in Jinan, and which ranked 86 in the Top500 published in July. ShenWei is a RISC and not an x86 processor,


so it requires its own instruction set. Both system and application soſtware will have to be customised for it, thus making programming and use of the machine more complex.


False dawn Tere is some suggestion that the next- generation ShenWei could come online as early as the end of this year, or towards the beginning of next year. However, there have been reports in the past that China would deploy its own processors in supercomputers. In particular the Dawning 6000 was supposed to incorporate the Loongson processor as its core (also sometimes called the Godson processor). Tis proved to be a false dawn: in the event, the Nebulae machine as it has come to be called, the second fastest in the world in June 2010, was a Dawning TC3600 Blade, incorporating Intel X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla GPUs. Loongson appears no longer to be being pursued as a processor for HPC. If ShenWei processors are used in a 100


Petaflop machine within the next year, there will be an element of historical irony, for the design of the chip appears to resemble very closely that of the ‘Alpha’ RISC chip developed by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and discontinued in 2007 by HP, which had inherited the technology through merger and acquisition. [Editor’s note: Publicly available details are sketchy and some statements may be revised as more information comes to light.]


The China Accelerator Te second domestically designed chip will be the ‘China Accelerator’ that the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) is developing for the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. As a result of the US embargo on Intel exporting any more Phi co-processors to the NUDT, the upgrade to the Tianhe-2 that will take it to 100 PFlops has been delayed until later in 2016. However, the effect has been to encourage the domestic development of Chinese co- processors.


www.scientific-computing.com l Te interconnection topology for the Tianhe


system is an optic-electronic hybrid. Te NUDT had already created the interconnects, using high-radix Network Routing Chips (NRC) and high-speed Network Interface Chips (NIC), both of which were designed by Chinese engineers and are Chinese intellectual property. Since the next-generation ShenWei will


be based on its own CPU chip and the co- processors for Tianhe-2 are being developed at the NUDT, China will enter the 100 Petaflop era with its own CPU, accelerator, and interconnect technologies.


More CPUs envisaged in the Five Year Plan? Tese developments are being conducted under the terms of the State High-Tech Development Plan, known as the 863 programme, which is funded and administered by the Chinese Government to stimulate the development of advanced technologies in a wide range of fields for the purpose of rendering China independent of financial obligations for foreign technologies. Te NUDT is also designated, as is Jiangnan University, under the 211 programme, which is intended to facilitate the development of Chinese higher education. Te 100 Petaflop version of the Tianhe-2


will have Intel E5 processors and the China Accelerators. However, it is clear that the Chinese intend any successor machine will have its own, domestically produced CPU, rather


IN THE LONG RUN, OUR OWN CHIPS WILL FOCUS ON CERTAIN MARKETS


than the Intel processors, as well as Chinese- made accelerators. It would make sense for China to develop


both a RISC and an x86 processor. However, it is not yet clear whether the NUDT, the home of x86 supercomputing at present, will develop a second line of processors in addition to the ShenWei. Ultimately, the developments will take place under the auspices of China’s 13th national Five Year Plan, which will cover the period from 2016 to 2020. Proposals on the future of supercomputing in China are being put forward for the first draſt of the plan, which will be drawn up in October this year. Te final plan will be submitted for approval to the National People’s Congress meeting in March 2016. Only when it is published aſter the meeting are we likely to have clarity.


Commercial companies stick with x86, for now Te independent development of Chinese microprocessors is a national strategic priority for the Government, but for the country’s commercial supercomputer manufacturers, the priority is to expand both in China and overseas. Tey are content, therefore to use non-Chinese processor chips (and GPUs) for the moment. In an interview with Scientific Computing


World at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt in July, Lei Wang vice president of Sugon (Dawning Information Industry) said that the processors being developed for high- performance computing within China ‘are used in national strategic projects. In the long run, our own chips will focus on certain markets. Companies have invested a lot in semiconductor chips for mobile applications but we focus on Intel and AMD for the commercial side.’ He said he did not expect an imminent breakthrough





China’s computing dominance starts young: the team from Tsinghua Univeristy won this year’s student cluster challenge at ISC High Performance


@scwmagazine AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015 13


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