Published in PC Hardware

China upgrades its supercomputers

by on21 September 2017


ARMs up its Tianhe-1A CPU-GPU hybrid 

The National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) has, boosted the Tianhe-1A CPU-GPU hybrid that was deployed in 2010 with some nice new ARM processors and possibly some Matrix2000 DSP accelerators.

As you might guess, it is rather difficult to tell what is going on as the entire project is rather secret and not much is leaking out. However, according to Chinese information, a second pre-exascale machine is on the drawing board and that will be an upgrade to the TaihuLight system using a future Shenwei processor.  This beastie will be installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan.

A third pre-exascale machine being funded by China is being architected in conjunction with AMD, with licensed server processor technology, and which everyone now thinks is going to be based on Epyc processors and possibly with Radeon Instinct GPU coprocessors.

According to Next Platform  a slide embedded in its report "showing the comparison between Tianhe-2, which was the fastest supercomputer in the world for two years, and Tianhe-2A, which will be vying for the top spot when the next list comes out". Every part of this system shows improvements.

The homegrown SW26010 processor that is at the heart of the TaihuLight machine has 260 cores running at 1.45 GHz and delivers about the same performance, at three teraflops double precision, as the “Knights Landing’ Xeon Phi 7000 series from Intel. TaihuLight, which is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, has 40,960 single-socket nodes in total, and after a lot of tuning since it first came out in June 2016, it is rated at a peak performance of 125.4 petaflops at double precision floating point and delivers a little over 93 petaflops of sustained performance on the Linpack parallel Fortran benchmark test that is used to rank supercomputers on the Top 500 list.

Last modified on 21 September 2017
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