October 28, 2011
The New York Times reported on Friday that China has built and installed a petaflop supercomputer using homegrown microprocessors. Apparently the machine is powered by 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 processors. From the NYT piece:
The announcement was made this week at a technical meeting held in Jinan, China, organized by industry and government organizations. The new machine, the Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province in eastern China.
Given that 8,700 chips were used to attain a petaflop of peak performance, each ShenWei SW1600 processor should deliver about 115 gigaflops, which is pretty much on par with a late-model quad-core x86 processor. As far as the nature of the chip itself, there was little information provided by the NYT report, other than to say "[t]he "ShenWei microprocessor appears to be based on some of the same design principles that are favored by Intel’s most advanced microprocessors..."
According to reports from the technical conference, the new super consumes just one megawatt of power. If true, that would be less than half power used by the one petaflop Blue Gene/P JUGENE system in Germany, one of the most energy efficient CPU-based supercomputers in production today.
A peak petaflop supercomputer would not place the machine in the top 10 of the TOP500 today, but the presence of the made-in-China processors is certainly a notable accomplishment, and indicative of the nation's growing HPC aspirations. China is also committed to employing its latest Godson processors in supercomputers. In February, at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Godson lead engineer Weiwu Hu said the Godson-3B will power the 300-teraflop Dawning machine that was scheduled to be deployed over the summer.
There may be even more of this kind of news on the horizon. According to a report from CPU World back in March, besides the Godson-based and ShenWei-based systems, another design based on something called "Yinhe" will be used in a supercomputer before the end of 2011. The CPU World report attributes both the ShenWei and Yinhe designs to the Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology and National University of Defense Technology.
Full story at The New York Times
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.