China's new super computing champion ends the breakthrough of "Tianhe-2" under the US ban
In the list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world (hereinafter referred to as "supercomputing"), China's "Tianhe-2" has become a legend with six consecutive titles. This record was ended in June 2016, and the terminator was "Shenwei · Light of Taihu Lake" from China.
This time, the new supercomputing champion also used Chinese independent knowledge product chips for the first time, completing a major breakthrough in China's supercomputing industry.
On June 20, at the 2016 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) held in Frankfurt, Germany, the latest list of the world's top 500 supercomputers was released. China's self-developed "Shenwei Taihu Light" supercomputer won the first place. This is the second time that China's supercomputer has reached the top after "Tianhe-1A" and "Tianhe-2".
Supercomputers, which are used in aerospace, climate simulation, biological information and many other aspects, are known as the "national key tool" for China's scientific and technological development. "Supercomputers are of great strategic significance in many fields of political economy. It can be said that besides theoretical research and scientific experiments, computing is the third way for humans to understand the world." Zhang Yunquan, Secretary General of the High Performance Computing Professional Committee of the Chinese Computer Society, told the Times Weekly.
On the same day that "Shenwei. Light of Taihu Lake" won the championship, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (hereinafter referred to as "Wuxi Supercomputing Center") was officially launched and operated, which was managed and operated by Tsinghua University. Professor Yang Guangwen, director of the center, said in an interview with Xinhuanet that "we will focus on the scientific and economic development needs of Jiangsu and the Yangtze River Delta, give full play to Tsinghua's disciplinary advantages, and build a high-performance computer industrial park in Wuxi relying on this platform in the future."
This undoubtedly points out the future industrialization path of "Shenwei · Taihu Light". Previously, some experts pointed out that China's supercomputing industrialization is not high, and supercomputing is suspected of being "wasted".
"At present, the industrialization and commercialization of supercomputers is really not high, because supercomputers are not available in most fields. However, supercomputer technology will radiate downward, which can bring application and technology improvement to our other commercial fields." Bao Yungang, a doctor from the Institute of Computing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told TIME.
Breakthrough under the US Chip Prohibition
At the Wuxi Supercomputing Center near Xili Lake, the original figure of "Shenwei · Light of Taihu Lake" is placed here. In its main engine room covering an area of 1000 square meters, 40 computer bins with black shells are neatly arranged on both sides, and the top of the bin emits blue light representing "technology".
The host in black and blue has extremely powerful performance. According to the data, the peak computing speed of "Shenwei · Taihu Light" reached 1.254 billion times per second, the continuous computing speed reached 0.93 billion times per second, and the performance power consumption ratio was 6.051 billion times per watt. All three indicators ranked first in the world, which also enabled "Shenwei · Taihu Light" to reach the top.
Zhai Jidong, an assistant researcher at the Institute of High Performance Computing of the Computer Department of Tsinghua University, said that "the teachers of Tsinghua Computer Department are responsible for participating in the supercomputing contest in Germany". The reporter of Time Weekly called the School of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, and the other party revealed that the participants were mainly graduate students of Tsinghua University.
Wuxi Supercomputing Center, managed and operated by Tsinghua University, currently serves as the director of Professor Yang Guangwen, who is the director of the Institute of High Performance Computing Technology of the Computer Department of Tsinghua University, while Fu Haohuan, the deputy director, is an associate researcher of the Earth System Science Research Center of Tsinghua University.
Zhai Jidong is a frequent visitor to the international supercomputing competition. In 2015, the supercomputing team of Tsinghua University, where he served as the instructor, won the champion of the three international undergraduate supercomputing competitions ASC15, ISC15 and SC15.
"In the supercomputing competition, we usually test the application optimization of your supercomputer. That time, under the 3000 watt power limit, the organizing committee gave a group of applications and then looked at the optimization results of each team. The preparation for the supercomputing competition is to optimize the performance of the program." Zhai Jidong introduced.
For the assessment of supercomputing, Zhang Yunquan commented: "In fact, among the indicators for the assessment of supercomputing, the most important thing is its continuous computing speed and power consumption, because the peak value is usually not reached in actual computing."
From the specific data, the floating point operation speed of "Shenwei Taihu Light" is 1.25 billion times per second, nearly twice as fast as the second ranking "Tianhe-2". It is also the only supercomputer in the world with a calculation speed of more than 1 billion times, and its efficiency is also three times higher than that of "Tianhe-2". In an interview with Xinhuanet, Yang Guangwen made an analogy that if the "Shenwei Light of Taihu Lake" is turned on and running for one minute, it is equivalent to that the global population has been using computers for 32 years at the same time without interruption. It is with the support of such computing performance that the Earth System Science Research Center of Tsinghua University has realized the numerical simulation of the earth system on the scale of one million nuclei and high resolution for the first time.
"The hardware level of Chinese supercomputers is already the world leader, but there is still a gap between the application software development of supercomputers and the users of supercomputers compared with other developed countries in Europe and the United States." Zhang Yunquan commented.
Bao Yungang said, "Now the industrialization and commercialization of supercomputers is a problem all over the world, and American supercomputers are just lying in national laboratories. For strategic reasons, although supercomputers have a large initial investment, we still need to develop supercomputing technology, which can radiate to the downstream of the industry and generate new technology applications. And with the development of technology, its cost will also drop, so it can be used in the databases of commercial companies such as Google and Baidu. "
