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China prototypes pre-exascale super trio with its own non-US chips
No American CPUs and accelerators in sight
Before any country can deploy an exascale system, they have to get pre-exascale prototypes into the field to test out their underlying technologies and determine what approaches have the best chance of scaling up performance and being manufactured affordably. It looks like China is looking at three different pre-exascale systems, and none of them will deploy processors or accelerators made by US companies.
It is no secret that China has wanted to develop an indigenous capability to design chips and build supercomputer-class systems, and this was true even before the US government put the kibosh on selling Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi coprocessors to certain labs in China last year. That ban spawned what, from the outside, looks like a flurry of new chip development activity, but what is clear from the unveiling of the 93 petaflops Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in June – a working system with a sophisticated and elegant processor that rivals anything an American, European, or Japanese company can put into the field. China has dabbled with Sparc and Alpha processors for years, and tried to create its own variant of the MIPS architecture with an X86 compatibility mode with the Godson chips. But with the Shenwei SW26010 processors used in the Sunway TaihuLight, which have 260 cores running at 1.45 GHz per socket and which delivers around 3 teraflops of number crunching power at double precision. Significantly, the performance of the SW26010 is on par with Intel’s “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processors, and gives China has a solid foundation on which to push upwards to exascale systems.
As it turns out, China is not betting solely on the Shenwei chips, and apparently has plans to build three different pre-exascale systems with three very different architectures, according to some tweets put out by James Lin, vice director for the Center of HPC at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
3 prototype systems for exascale will be ready by end of 2017 in China. Each has ~2.5PF in Peak and ~500-600 nodes.
— James Lin@SJTU (@jameslinsjtu) July 11, 2016
The winner will be chosen to build the "exascale system" in peak performance by 2020.
— James Lin@SJTU (@jameslinsjtu) July 11, 2016
One is by NUDT with ARM approach to be deployed in Tianjing national center, where hosts Tianhe-1A.
— James Lin@SJTU (@jameslinsjtu) July 11, 2016
Another is by Taihulight team with the next generation SW CPU to be deployed on Jinan national center, where hosts Sunway bluelight.
— James Lin@SJTU (@jameslinsjtu) July 11, 2016
The third is by Sugon with AMD licenced x86 CPU to be deployed in both Shanghai supercomputer center and Shenzhen national center.
— James Lin@SJTU (@jameslinsjtu) July 11, 2016
Due to the embark to Tianhe-2, CPU in all national-level supercomputers needs to be "self-controlable". US leaves China no choice.
— James Lin@SJTU (@jameslinsjtu) July 11, 2016
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