China Builds World's Fastest Supercomputer Without U.S. Chips (computerworld.com) 247
Reader dcblogs writes: China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors. There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops (Linpack is 93 petaflops), according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers. It has been long known that China was developing a 100-plus petaflop system, and it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level. But just over a year ago, in a surprising move, the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers. The U.S. initiated this ban because China, it claimed, was using its Tianhe-2 system for nuclear explosive testing activities. The U.S. stopped live nuclear testing in 1992 and now relies on computer simulations. Critics in China suspected the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts. There has been nothing secretive about China's intentions. Researchers and analysts have been warning all along that U.S. exascale (an exascale is 1,000 petaflops) development, supercomputing's next big milestone, was lagging.
consequences... (Score:5, Insightful)
This happens when you don't allow export of your chips to someone who has the knowledge to design their own chips.
It gives them the incentive to accelerate development and deployment of their homegrown designs.
Not only do you lose a business opportunity, you're also in danger of losing your technology leadership.
Re:consequences... (Score:4, Informative)
Using western licensed IP of course. These chips are based on MIPS.
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It always strikes me as a great irony that much of China's technical progress has been based on other peoples' work. The Soviets gave the Chinese nuclear technology before the big falling out, and much of China's technological advancement over the last four decades has been via Western technology, either legally obtained or via out and out theft.
Re: consequences... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every techonological advancement is based on 'other people's' work. That's the very nature of scientific research. Open communication, peer reviewing and co-development are hindered or led astray by nationalistic political interests, which are _the obstacles_ to overcome.
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That's not the architecture in these chips. You're referring to the older Loongson which was a licensed from a MIPS clone designer who had questionable patent situation concerning several patented CPU instructions. These instructions magically appeared in later Loongsons, but that's not the point of this article.
The CPUs in this article are reported to be very similar to DEC Alpha 21164, and it has been reported that no such intellectual property license exists.
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Re:consequences... (Score:4, Insightful)
This happens when you don't allow export of your chips to someone who has the knowledge to design their own chips.
It gives them the incentive to accelerate development and deployment of their homegrown designs.
Not only do you lose a business opportunity, you're also in danger of losing your technology leadership.
Yes, penny wise, but pound foolish decision. China would never do the same to us because they want us to be dependent on their production.
It is pretty idiotic that our foreign policy and military establishment seem intent on picking periodic fights with China over stupid little things rather than trying to elevate the relationship to become close allies. China and US economies are closely tied. We literally would not have Christmas without China. Much of our equipment is made in China. And for China they have the US to thank for much of their growth over the past 40 years.
And they have a military that could hurt us quite a bit once they turn off our satellites and other technology. Or worse, use our technology against us after they infiltrate it.
Despite fighting a proxy war with China in Korea sixty years ago, we don't have the kind of bad blood that especially poisons their relations with Japan, Vietnam or even Korea.
For the sake of US prosperity and world peace it would be best to find the compromises that can keep us on good terms and get us to better relations and not push us further apart.
As for Chinese human rights... well we are allies with Saudi Arabia which has the worst human rights record on the planet. And we are far less (indirectly) dependent on Saudi oil than we used to be.
Re: consequences... (Score:4, Insightful)
so you would just give them the south china sea uncontested in violation of all international laws and treaties?
forgot tibet already?' tiannamen square ring a bell?
no? ok lets just be friends yay!
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How is being antagonistic going to resolve those issues? And do you think China has forgotten Guantanamo, Iraq, Iran-Contra etc?
If you constantly bring up the other party's past you won't get anywhere. The way forward is to try to cooperate and effect changes in behaviour that way. You don't have to give them the South China Sea, but you don't have to go out of your way to piss them off either.
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The USA has cognitive dissonance with China:
i.e. We want your (cheap foreign) goods but you can't have our top (computer) chips ...
Thankfully the economies are tied so it is everyone best's interest to keep both healthy.
Re:consequences... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is pretty idiotic that our foreign policy and military establishment seem intent on picking periodic fights with China over stupid little things rather than trying to elevate the relationship to become close allies.
Have you been living under a rock for the last several years? The Chinese have been using dredgers to build artificial islands [time.com] atop coral reefs in the South China Sea, and these islands are now equipped with huge runways for operating military craft from fighters to patrol aircraft to medium bombers; all so they can project firepower over the entire South China Sea. To simply claim the entire Sea right up to the coasts of their regional neighbors as their own [puu.sh] is one thing, but China has invested in a massive military build-up to back up their claims with raw force. Many of those nations are our regional allies, especially the Philippines. And if that's not enough, the Chinese have long engaged in hostile cybercrimes against the United States, not only hacking critical military defense information (like the information on the F-35 they stole) but also an ongoing government-ran campaign to steal American commercial trade secrets [cnbc.com] that mirrors their complete and utter disdain for Western Intellectual Property rights.
And you're going to tell me that America is the one "picking fights" because we dared sail a ship too close to a few of their sand-castles? Freedom of Navigation exercises are run frequently, all over the globe, and are NOT mutually exclusive with traditional diplomacy. [foreignaffairs.com]
I understand that some people are deeply suspicious or even disdainful of America's role in world politics; but when you try to make out the 800 pound gorilla of Asia - who's busy mugging everyone it can get its hairy paws on - as the poor victim here, you just come across as a moron.
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I see you didn't click any of the links. For starters, the this one [foreignaffairs.com] clearly explains that these "drive-bys" are not, in any way, shape or form, mutually exclusive with traditional diplomacy. They're a tool for enhancing traditional diplomacy. This [thediplomat.com] link explains the legal nuances of the freedom of navigation operation in much greater detail, and describes the legal and diplomatic needle the operation was threading. Sailing a single destroyer past an island is hardly a flexing of military muscle. Flexing musc
Finally, (Score:5, Funny)
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How many nude photos... (Score:2, Funny)
How many nude photo's did they have to send in to get the loan to built that thing?
Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha? (Score:2)
Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?
Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?
Hopefully they reverse engineered out all the spy shit that gets built into anything made by a US company (who can be served a national security letter demanding they insert backdoors and not tell anyone about it). Not saying the Chinese won't build their own spy shit into their own chips, but it only makes sense to drop products made by US companies.
On the other hand, aren't all the 'US made chips' actually made in China anyway, and its really just the intellectual property that is US? And the Chinese don't really give a shit about US intellectual property ownership anyway?
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Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha (Score:5, Informative)
The older systems, like Longson, are MIPS using a questionable license with patent problems.
These systems are directly derived from DEC Alpha.
So, not homegrown, more like "homecloned" from US chips and then enhanced.
In other words, the hard work was already done, and they just took it.
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These systems are directly derived from DEC Alpha.
I seriously wonder where they got the Alpha stuff from. Did HP (after the DEC merger) sell it off (Carly?), was it stolen outright?
I for one mourn the Alphas, they packed serious punch. If only HP had kept those on instead of Itanic... we might be seeing a
bit more diversity in CPUs than what's essentially a duopoly x86 / ARM (yes, I know there's still SPARC etc., but seriously...).
Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha (Score:5, Interesting)
> was it stolen outright?
About 20 years ago, our IT manager at DEC noticed an extremely large download being made to the office in Japan over the weekend. He killed the connection and investigated. They were accessing the Alpha design docs and got away with pretty much everything. They were just starting to download the process docs and didn't get very far. So we at the time knew we'd see something Alphaish popping up in China about a decade later. In 2006 the ShenWei appeared on the scene and it bore striking resemblance to the Alpha 21164A, the processor design docs that happened to be downloaded that weekend long ago.
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There is also PowerPC but again not all that common.
I remember seeing the Alpha when it first came out and thinking wow that is cool, too bad it will be a really big hit. I kept asking the rep about mass market products that would use it and they looked at me like I was nuts.
Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha (Score:5, Insightful)
So, not homegrown, more like "homecloned" from US chips and then enhanced.
In other words, the hard work was already done, and they just took it.
Think back to when Chips & Technologies made their own IBM PC-AT chipset (5 chips replacing the 63 the PC-AT used). It was nothing more than a clever clone... but once the clone happened it set in motion companies other than IBM to develop the standard. Think, for a moment, of the first 80386 system: the Compaq DeskPro 386. That was an original design, not cloned from IBM.
Yes, I completely agree. This is a "homecloned" system - for now. The next version is likely to have some innovations; the version following even more. Within 5 generations it will be it's own system.
Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha (Score:5, Insightful)
It really is non-US chips no matter how they got the original blueprints. The notion of US intellectual property in China is laughable at best. Additionally, China may not have a lot of folks that can invent, and that pretty much goes for all other countries because Intel is actually that good at being a brain drain but I digress, but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing on quite remarkable scales. So while they may not invent the process for 5nm chips, once they see one done and get a few pictures of the process, they're pretty good at putting the pieces together to get up and running.
However, it is my opinion that the bigger point here isn't that China is great at stealing technology, it is that China, and more so the world, honestly doesn't need American technology [theregister.co.uk] especially if the Americans are so hell bent in making insecure devices and resorting to petty trade restrictions to maintain some sort of faux-superiority position because the American legislative body finds in unstylish to fund actual research to maintain a real superiority position or they feel that real superiority is found in funding some guy digging a tunnel to extract black rocks, pumping dead liquid dinosaur remains from the ground, or ensuring that humans build crap at ineffective rates.
If anything Americans should take this as a sign that their priorities are insanely messed up. Doubtful that they would actually do anything about it, but at least they can know that all their Jerry Springer level bickering will ultimately mean that they need to resort to more and more useless childish games on ensuring that they stay relevant on the global stage. The downside to that is that the rest of the world has to suffer these stupid antics because Americans can't grow up and admit that they're loosing the top spot.
Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha (Score:4, Insightful)
China may not have a lot of folks that can invent ... but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing
Do you see the problem with this sentence?
Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha (Score:4, Informative)
The Chinese ability to reverse engineer being a superpower is a hoax. They can't even design jet engines and still have to buy them from Russia, because in the very high tech it's about understanding the basis, not just copying a layout.
"Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5" (Score:2)
Re:"Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5" (Score:4, Informative)
Can't confirm, but more then 98% of all the super computers on the Top500 run Linux of some variety, so more than likely it is.
Re:"Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5" (Score:5, Informative)
I was curious what OS it runs. TOP500 says "Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5". Googling "Sunway" is just giving me some Malaysian resort town, and "RaiseOS" yields nothing at all. Does anyone know anything about this OS? Is it Linux?
from TFA: "TaihuLight, which is installed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise. "
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From the article:
Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? (Score:3)
Questions for those who know: Tianhe-2 is notoriously hard to program for. Will this be any better? And will USA ever catch up?
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I would anticipate it's even worse. Though it's not about programmability, the amount of memory relative to the compute shows that this system is pretty much designed to do one thing and one thing well: xhpl. Everything else is questionable.
Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? (Score:5, Funny)
...Tianhe-2 is notoriously hard to program for. ... And will USA ever catch up?
The Chinese currently have beat everyone else in this, but I believe there are several U.S. government funded teams working on developing supercomputers that are increasingly difficult to program.
Anybody know more details about the CPUs? (Score:2)
The article mentions that the cluster uses "ShenWei CPUs" but doesn't give details, and the wiki [wikipedia.org] only talks about chips that were released in 2010 and earlier. Is it using the Alpha instruction set (as Wikipedia seems to imply), or does it have additional instructions, or is it using something else entirely? Can you buy these things (and compatible motherboards) of AliExpress? Do they have an equivalent to IME [slashdot.org]?
Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? (Score:5, Informative)
The above was from my (rejected) submission on the same computer
As it is too big I won't quote the entire submitted article here, suffice to give you the link to it - https://slashdot.org/submissio... [slashdot.org]
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the new ShenWei (roughly translates to The Wrath of God in Mandarin)
Umm... what? Got an official source for that translation? Because that sounds like propagandistic nonsense to me.
1) China is an officially atheist state, and on that basis alone I doubt they would choose such a name.
(China did have an ancient tradition of monotheism, but it ceased to be the dominant religion a long, long time ago. Moreover, in ancient times it was closely associated with the position of the emperor, considered an enemy of the people under Communism. In modern times, it is associated with C
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Do they have an equivalent to IME [slashdot.org]?
Why would that matter? They've built a line of chips for their system. These are probably suitable for their needs and do exactly what they wanted them to do. Any management element is something they worked out for themselves and does what they decided it would do.
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It doesn't matter to them. It matters to me because I'm interested in owning desktop PCs with unusual architectures and don't like backdoors.
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ARM based chips currently don't have microcoded backdoors. You can build a "slow" desktop based on that, for your purposes.
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Check this LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ch... [linkedin.com]
"Help other members to migrate Ubuntu desktop to SW64 and Loongson architecture (SW64 is Shen Wei 64-bit, based on Alpha; and Loongson is a kind of machine of MIPs)."
And:
"At present, Migrating several Applications to Ubuntu desktop under SW64 and Loongson architecture (it is mainly about qemu development with qemu upstream members)."
Whew... (Score:3)
A quadrillion? That's alot of flops.
Where is the news? (Score:5, Insightful)
A computer built with hardware that was NOT made in China, that would be news.
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What's really interesting is that they aren't using a western ISA either, this is a Chinese developed one that is not compatible with x86 or ARM etc. It seems to have been developed from scratch and it's not entirely clear what software supports it, but it's exciting because apparently the performance is excellent and anything that is not x86/ARM is interesting.
Away from the desktop Chinese CPUs look really attractive. Low cost, high performance, unlikely to feature NSA/GCHQ backdoors and often they are qui
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> unlikely to feature NSA/GCHQ backdoors
Chips from China. No backdoors. Riiiiiight.
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Perhaps, but I'm less worried about the Chinese ones because the Chinese government has a lot less power to screw up my life.
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I understand what you are saying and as such agree to the sentiment. The issue we the people have against US govt back-doors is that it goes against the very foundation of our Constitution and thus is morally and politically repulsive. Thus your statement about the Chinese govt.
However the problem is not the Chinese govt (unless you have an interesting job, which I don't) but the hackers which may have been sponsored by china at some point and thus familiar with the chip capability and the ability to screw
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The news is about the chips being Chinese "designed" (quotes because I don't think anyone seriously thinks they designed them from scratch), but as a side note China actually only has a dozen or so semiconductor fabs [wikipedia.org]. Most fabs are in the US, with Taiwan a (distant) second (assuming that list isn't woefully incomplete).
Manufacturing only goes to China because labor there is cheap. For stuff like semiconductor fabrication, offshoring to China makes very little sense, since much of the work is automated anyw
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A computer built with hardware that was NOT made in China, that would be news.
If we're talking about high-end processors, then chips made in China would be news. How many Intel fabs are there in China? How about TSMC? How about Samsung? Foxconn assembly is not the same as fabbing a chip.
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C'mon, can't we go one thread without someone mentioning how gay Apple's design looks like?
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That thread is about security and how to protect your privacy, why should anyone be talking about Apple there?
(ok, 'nuf Apple bashing for today, but you have to admit, he was asking for it)
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Teachable moment for the pols (Score:5, Informative)
So the moral of the story here ought to be that while the USA may be a tech leader, it isn't as if there are not tech centers in the rest of the world more than capable of building technology on the leading edge.
So when people the like the FBI director make asinine statements like how people will switch to non US crypto technologies and message platforms only 'theoretically' they should respond with laughter.
CONgress and the Administration need to pull their heads out of their assess (which will be hard given how far up there they are) and realize that if they insist on stupid export controls and technology that legally has to be broken by design; they will accomplish none of their security goals and only harm our economy in the process.
Re:Teachable moment for the pols (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely.
What this news tell us is Intel could have sold 10 million cores but was forbidden from doing so. The money that could have gone Intel's way have been used to improve Chinese chip manufacturing and the USA has failed to achieve the goal of stopping China from building a supercomputer more advanced than the best one in USA.
Hilarious
Pulls (Score:2)
the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers
That's OK...they'll just use pulls from all the e-waste we ship over there.
We should have ... (Score:2)
Oh, sorry. The ME is only for keeping an eye on our own citizens.
Imagine the frame rate in DOOM! (Score:2)
Where do I buy one? (Score:3)
>>the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts.
How'd that work out for ya?
Well, at least according to Corney, they can't do crypto for shit.
Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind buying a computer with one of these Chinese chips in it. Better than one backdoored up the Yin Yang by a government that can actually ruin my chances in life for having the wrong opinions....Seriously, what do I care if the Chinese government spies on me? Why, that's correct, Mr Chen, my opinions on free speech are dangerously subsersive .... to China.
More info at ... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fe7e... [ft.com]
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno... [bbc.com]
http://top500.org/news/china-t... [top500.org]
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6... [theverge.com]
http://www.netlib.org/utk/peop... [netlib.org]
Or my (rejected) submission at https://slashdot.org/submissio... [slashdot.org]
Re:More info at ... (Score:5, Funny)
There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops (Linpack is 93 petaflops), according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers.
We can encourage them to run Windows 10 on it and regain our superiority.
Re:More info at ... (Score:5, Funny)
Reports were that engineers hoped to keep Sunway TaihuLight running Windows 7 in perpetuity, but the system's record-breaking performance caused a forced Windows 10 upgrade to be completed in 2.4 seconds - just too quickly for anyone to hit "Cancel".
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And that's how we know they're lying: there is no Cancel button. Personally, instead of being a dick waving contest I think they're just trying to save face after one of the engineers clicked the X to close the window despite it being widely reported that this will start the Windows 10 install.
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stay on target Mavrick, we are ChinaBashing here, leave MS bash$ on edge /.
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a commonly known BS is still BS. i am also inclined not to believe anything that comes from china.
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Reports were that engineers hoped to keep Sunway TaihuLight running Windows 7 in perpetuity, but the system's record-breaking performance caused a forced Windows 10 upgrade to be completed in 2.4 seconds - just too quickly for anyone to hit "Cancel".
It runs on Raise OS 2.0.5, which is "Linux based" - whatever that may be (a fork of the kernel? a distro?).
Naw, they are just using Cheap Chinese knock off of some AMD processors they purchased on EBay..
They are using the ShenWei [wikipedia.org] SW26010 [wikipedia.org] CPU.
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The SW64 chips that are being used for the new ShenWei supercomputer reportedly doesn't have L1, L2, nor L3 cache at all
This sounds more like an omission in the data rather than what it probably has. It would be nonsensical to not have any on-chip cache on a processor like that. It would stall like mad.
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Is that some wounded american pride I see?
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I'd say it's more casual racism.
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thankfully the US never committed wholesale IP theft? Oh wait.. they did...
Yes, The US Industrial Revolution Was Built On Piracy And Fraud
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130228/01324622146/yes-us-industrial-revolution-was-built-piracy-fraud.shtml
Perhaps "Alexander Hamilton" is Chinese in your mind?
Read his “Report on Manufactures" published 1791
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Not ok, just no position to complain (Score:3)
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But it does mean "entity1" shouldn't have a holier-then-thou attitude. After all, a thief complaining someone else steals from him never makes a very ethical-compelling case, and is being rather hypocritical.
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I guess its time for the US to steal high-tech from China.
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I'm not sure any nation has put as much work into the development of semiconductor technology as the US. Yes, lots of work was done elsewhere, and yes, lots of people from elsewhere come to the US and work in academia or for private companies working on that technology, but I think the history of the development of computers puts the US in a rather special place; first country to develop a first completely electronic computer, the country that invented the transistor, and the first country to develop an int
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And that matters why?
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And they are packed with foreign students because our educational system has been priced out of reach of lower and middle income families due to short-sighted political decisions driven primarily by corporate tax avoidance. Tax avoidance by corporations leads to overly costly education? Yes, because now there aren't enough corporate taxes to fund our public educational institutions so tuition can be free like it was in the days when the political asshats now in control went to school.
pointless brute force super computing (Score:5, Interesting)
Other than the singular purpose of doing the rare but interesting exascale problem the real utility of figuring out how to build exascale is to figure out how to build petascale cheaply on the "desktop". DOE's target for exascale is a scalable architecture that will sip mere megawatts of enegy this means that when they get there petawatt will be of the order of magnitude of 10KW. in other words, something easily power by a car engine. it will mean that petascale will be ubiquitous. Every hospital could have one in their basement.
the Titan super computer at oakridge has 299,008 cores and 18petaflops. if they built 5 of these they could hit 91 petaflops with 1.5 million cores. That's ten time fewer than the chinese super computer requires.
Now cores ain't everything. ultimately it's petaflops per watt but I don't have those statistics so I'm using cores as a proxy. I will admit that there is a school of thought in computer that having a lot of slow low power cores may be better than fewer fast high power cores whenever the bottleneck is memory bandwidth. And since I don't know the chinese architecture I don't know if that's what they are doing here.
Nonethe less. for mere factors of 10, brute forcing is always possible and doesn't really advance the state of the art--- that is, you cant scale that to factors of 1000 by brute force. You have to drop the power per petawatt to get anywhere. Scaling up to more cores can even be counter productive for any problem involving long range coupling between cores. Thus while it gets you more embarassingly paralell flops it doesn't get you better calculations on real problems.
Re:pointless brute force super computing (Score:5, Informative)
I found some data on watts. It looks like the chinese computer is 16MW and the Titan is 8MW. So it appears they are using lower power, slower CPUs on the SHenWei. Overall this means they are getting better petaflops per watt than the US computer. Thus I was incorrect in saying it was pointless brute force. They are one the way to lower gigaflops/watt.
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It's also worth noting that the Titan has a lot of NVIDIA chips too, so it's not 100% AMD either, and I don't know where either of those is made. Likely china I suppose.
Re:pointless brute force super computing (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, the Chinese Supercomputer is using 1.45 GHz 260-core custom-ISA 64-bit RISC chips.
Yup, 260 cores. Each with a 256-bit FMAC SIMD unit. It's not a traditional CPU architecture, it clearly uses some aspects of Intel's Larrabee/Knights Landing platform, and GPU architectures (in particular the cache arrangement).
Each chip can process 3 TFLOPS of double precision floating point.
Re:pointless brute force super computing (Score:5, Informative)
Titan manages 466kW/petaflop, while TaihuLight manages 164kW/petaflop. The Chinese computer is much, much more efficient. It's also worth noting that much of Titan's performance is due to GPUs, which are not general purpose CPUs and can't be used for arbitrary computing tasks.
Comparing the number of cores is pointless, it's the work done per watt and per yuan that's important. And it's not like you could just scale Titan up, it would need about 90MW just to run which causes both supply and severe heat problems.
The CPUs the Chinese have built are really impressive. Performance is on a par with Intel's latest Xeno Phi chips, but they developed their own ISA and silicon from scratch, and then compilers and a Linux port.
Perhaps not a lie... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's entirely possible this is an extravagant expense to hit #1 in Top500, but not able to do anything else. Looking at the architecture, about all that system can do is run xhpl really good. They talk about practical applications, but it seems the described system skimps on all sorts of things that would be important for real work, but not needed as much for xhpl benchmark runs.
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But...but...but..Aren't the Chinese supposed to be just imitators?
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But...but...but..Aren't the Chinese supposed to be just imitators?
And you think their CPU design built on copied DEC Alpha ISA proves otherwise?
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This is my guess as well. Not to bag on the Chinese, but I feel like this is a dog-n-pony show to show up the U.S. Gov't who denied them Xeons.
It's the same way the US government responsed in the late 80s/early 90s about strong encryption. To get a copy of PGP I had to click through all kinds of legalese and forms certifying that I was in fact not going to export it to foreign countries. They seriously considered strong encryption to be munitions, like bullets and bombs. They still do the same thing over Generation III nightvision equipment - civilians can have it, but if you try to take it out of the country it's federal prison time.
That menta
Re:Arogance (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to teach a pretty decent load of Chinese students in my classes in Manhattan (I taught at both NYU and on CUNY). By the '00s, they were significantly more creative, sophisticated, well-rounded, and learned (I make no claims about "intelligence") than my American students, who were really sort of "decadent" in the worst, stereotypical ways—knew only a few things about a few things but a lot about consumer goods and fashion, and didn't seem to think they needed to work, just didn't feel the global pressure from competing workers. Very entitled.
The Chinese students tended to cluster in 'A' territory and always approached me after class to talk about class topics until I had to leave, then followed up with serious questions by email. The American students always had one or two in the 'A' group and the rest clustering around low B and high C, and it was a struggle just to learn their names, as they had nothing at all to say to me unless I called on them in class. Ironically, many of the Chinese students had better formal English as well, though there were always also about half that were clearly 'winging it' and needed ESL—but were killing it in class performance anyway, managing to learn and to get through books by relying on a dictionary, a study group, and sheer determination.
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Jimmy Breslin, the New York Daily News columnist, was the first to discover the ascendency of Chinese science students in NYC.
He saw that the top scorers in the computer game machines at Bronx High School of Science all had Chinese names.
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Re:Arogance (Score:4, Insightful)
But that statement in itself isn't worth anything. You where teaching filtered Chinese Students in a elite topic, outside of China. Some part of a given is that they will be better than the locals, based on the fact they are export.
That said, the statement is worth something, as a cultural examination.
Re:Arogance (Score:4, Informative)
Not to hit against the "Chinese are hard working and intelligent" meme you got going there. But you are talking about NYU... its an Arts college. A ton of Actors come out there every year. Not exactly a STEM focused group. Your foreign students who are usually the most well off (financially and educationally) in their native countries aren't exactly going up against the best and brightest of America (again, in STEM fields). How would you rate the Chinese in Performance Arts or History or Social Sciences?
Additionally, keep in mind, most Americas don't ever need to work anywhere has hard in terms of labor nor have as many unfair obstacles as foreigners. They have no need nor pressure to push themselves to those extremes just to make a living. So they can take it easy and still have a life that is better off than 50/60/70% of the world?
Not to say that Indians, Japanese, Africans, and Chinese aren't giving the natives a run for their money. But lets keep things relative here. People who come here to study aren't exactly average nor grew up in an easy environment. I would accept the argument that the top 10% there are probably better and larger than our top 30%, but I think its a stretch to say that Americas are that far behind.
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Not to hit against the "Chinese are hard working and intelligent" meme you got going there. But you are talking about NYU... its an Arts college. A ton of Actors come out there every year. Not exactly a STEM focused group.
NYU's machine learning graduate program is highly regarded and has been ranked among the top 10 in the nation.
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China is a billion strong, you're only going to see the best and brightest make it to top overseas Universities.
That reflects on what it takes to rise to the top in a large, overpopulated country with rampant poverty - you worked with the best of the best of the best.
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93 petaflops in linpack. Nothing theoretical about that. Go back to pouting in your mom's basement. Jingoism and chanting is a jock thing.
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