China Builds 1-Petaflop Homegrown Supercomputer 185
MrSeb writes "Drawing yet another battle line between the incumbent oligarchs of the West and the developing hordes of the East, China has unveiled a new supercomputer that uses entirely-homegrown processors — 8,704 of them, to be exact. The computer is called Sunway BlueLight MPP and it has a peak performance of just over 1 petaflop — or around the 15th fastest supercomputer in the world. Sunway uses the ShenWei SW-3 1600, a 16-core, 64-bit MIPS-compatible (RISC) CPU. The process used to make the chips is not known, but it is likely 65 or 45nm, a few generations behind Intel's latest and greatest. Each of the 139,264 cores runs at 1.1GHz, the entire system has 150TB of memory and 2PB of storage, and of course it's water-cooled. The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China — as in, the country itself — probably reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha CPU in 2001 and has been developing ever since. Sunway is significant for two reasons: a) It's very low-power; it consumes just one megawatt, about half of its contemporaries and one seventh of the US's Jaguar — and b) This is China's first significant supercomputer to be built without Intel or AMD processors."
Re:I don't quite understand (Score:4, Informative)
If I were them, I'd one of the OpenSPARC cores.
You a verb there.
From wikipedia:
In 2007, a deal was reached by MIPS Technologies and ICT. STMicroelectronics bought a MIPS license for Loongson, and thus the processor can be promoted as MIPS-based or MIPS-compatible instead of MIPS-like.
In June 2009, ICT licenced the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures directly from MIPS Technologies.
In August 2011, Loongson Technology Corp. Ltd. licensed the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures from MIPS Technologies, Inc. for continued development of MIPS-based Loongson CPU cores.
Yet another FUD article trolling for xenophobic reactions.
Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde? (Score:2, Informative)
The rise of the West in the last few hundred years can been attributed to the Renaissance
The Renaissance happened partly/mostly due to a bunch of Italians rediscovering ancient Greek and Roman knowledge. Ergo, the West as we know it got to where it is by copying the Greeks/Romans
But of course, it's also around the time of Renaissance that the modern notion copyright and intellectual property surfaced.
Thus, we have the doublethink that makes it OK for the West to copy ancient Greeks/Romans, but not OK for other cultures to copy the West.
Re:Yeah, funny however that this story is written (Score:4, Informative)
Disputed; the US, UK, and Germany all have credible claims.
UK and Germany, but I believe the Germans got theirs running first.
Most of the major players in WWII, and some minor ones. I believe the UK had the best system, but the US got naming rights.