China Makes Its Own Supercomputing Cores
Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2011 4:49 pm
HPC Wire
China Expects to Compete with Intel, in 20 Years
And also...By the end of the year, Chinese supercomputers will stop using imported processors and will instead rely on homegrown chips, according to an article in People's Daily Online. Billed as the world's fastest supercomputer, China's Tianhe-1A system, which gets its CPUs and GPUs from US vendors Intel and NVIDIA respectively, could be the country's last to use foreign-built components. Going forward, supercomputers will employ China's domestically-developed Loongson series of microchips, also known as the Godson processor.
On Saturday, National People's Congress Deputy Hu Weiwu, lead developer of the Loongson series of microchips at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), revealed that the institute's upcoming "Dawning 6000" supercomputer will use 10,000 of the Loongson series chips to achieve a petaflop of processing power.
Implementing these chips into supercomputers is a national priority for China, the article reports. The Institute of Computing Technology of CAS, the Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology and the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) are all on schedule to start development of Godson processor-based systems this year. In addition to defense workloads, the machines will be used for science applications such as geology, meteorology and medicine
China Expects to Compete with Intel, in 20 Years
China, which recently ascended to the top of the world's supercomputer powers, said that, by the end of this year, it will not be using foreign processors for its future supercomputers anymore.
Instead, the country intends to rely on its own Loongson series of processing cores.
The upcoming Dawning 6000 supercomputer is expected to use 10,000 of these chips to achieve an estimated 1 Petaflop of processing performance. While it is a national priority to use its own processors, scientists admitted that it is difficult at this time to exploit the full potential of the chips as there aren't programmers who can squeeze every bit of horsepower out of them.
China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer, currently the world's fastest supercomputer, uses a total of 186,368 cores and achieves a peak performance of 4.7 PFlops. The systems uses Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs as well as Nvidia Tesla GPUs.
China expects that it will take at least 10 years until the chips will be able to supply the domestic market. In 20 years, China wants to compete with companies such as Intel here in the U.S.
