In the game of high-performance computing, China has revealed itself to be a major player. China’s role as an HPC superpower was confirmed when the country secured the number one spot on the November 2010 TOP500 list with the 2.5-petaflops Tianhe-1A supercomputer. The win pushed the reigning Cray XT5 “Jaguar” system at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility into second place. China has also kicked off a line of home-grown computer chips, which will reduce the country’s reliance on foreign processors.
Against such a backdrop, Frank Munger of the Knoxville News Sentinel was contemplating the highly competitive nature of the global supercomputing race, an issue fraught with national security implications, and wondered about the possibility for collaboration in such a charged atmosphere. To get clarification on this sensitive issue, Munger sought out the expert opinion of Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientific computing chief Jeff Nichols.
When asked “if HPC was an area that’s simply off-limits for partnering with China,” Nichols responded:
“No, we need to work with them on that. They’re a force to be reckoned with, and we can’t ignore them. We have to understand what their vision is, what their strategies are.”
Nichols raised the point that each country’s supercomputing strategy could be improved upon. For example, despite their success with building ultra-fast machines, the Chinese are still dependent on US-made componentry for their high-end computers. “They would love to be able to design their own X86 processors, their own GPU processors and not rely on the U.S.,” Nicols told Munger. The country is also struggling with developing multicore-aware software. On this point, application development, Nichols says ORNL would be open to collaboration.
While Nichols believes in the value of teamwork and the likelihood that a US-Chinese scientific alliance would be mutually beneficial, he is heedful of the limitations such a partnership would be subject to, stating: “You’ve got to be careful. Because there are a lot of export control laws that we need to be worried about. … We’ve got to be really careful on that.”
In less provocative affairs, Munger also covers ORNL’s budding relationship with graphics chipmaker NVIDIA. That partnership could be about to bear fruit in the form of an on-campus center bearing the GPU maker’s moniker.