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Duane Benson
re: the H1-B comment - One of the strongest competitive advantages that this ...
tfc
Correction: I did get a Pell grant. Other than that, nothing.
Interconnect pushed China super to #1
Rick Merritt
10/28/2010 2:14 PM EDT
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A homegrown, ultrafast interconnect chip set was part of the secret sauce behind the Tianhe-1a, the first China-built system to be named the world's fastest supercomputer. The 160 Gbit/second Galaxy interconnect links thousands of the latest Intel Westmere and Nvidia Fermi processors in the system that will be used for a broad range of scientific research.
The Tainhe-1a in Tianjin was measured at 2.5 petaflops using the Linpack benchmark. The previous top supercomputer was the U.S.-based Jaguar built by Cray using six-core AMD processors to deliver 1.7 petaflops.
The accomplishment is a major milestone for China's advancing electronics industry. The Galaxy interconnect is twice as fast as the Infiniband QDR interconnects used on many of today's fastest supercomputers based on chips from Mellanox Technologies.
U.S. researchers said the news underscores the need for greater federal spending in the U.S. on research in high-performance systems. "It’s a sign they are making a long term investment," said Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee researcher who helps compile the twice annual Top 500 list of supercomputers.
"The next stage would be replacing the U.S. processors—and they are executing on chips replacing the Intel and Nvidia parts," said Dongarra, referring to China's Godson processors. "Then the machine becomes more interesting and of greater concern" to U.S. researchers, he said.
A China-built supercomputer in Shenzhen hit number two on the Top 500 supercomputer list published in June using Intel and Nvidia processors. Researchers on that project said their next-generation system will use China's Godson chips.
The U.S. has "not made adequate investment across the board on the key components of the supercomputer ecosystem," he said.
Next: Inside the Tianhe-1a
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nicolas.mokhoff
10/29/2010 1:25 AM EDT
Let's not forget that Linpacks is but one, albeit, most accepted performance measuring stick, as LinPack custodian Jack Dongarra himself states. The specific application determines the supercomputer's strenght and weakness. As China gains respect with its technical prowess it will be interesting to see to what use it puts its petaflops. Revving up the rpm of your engine in place doesn't get you far.
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BalaLak
10/29/2010 2:11 AM EDT
I am curious to know how the all-Chinese super computer will look like & perform - when is it likely to happen?
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Neo1
10/29/2010 3:08 AM EDT
What it will look like? why do we suspect a dragon, it will be a box of stacked cards what else!
Interesting question is how do these multimillion $ super comp compare against hundreds of low cost networked giga hz systems for real world apps?
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t.alex
10/29/2010 5:22 AM EDT
Is it really fast thanks to interconnect only?
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rick.merritt
10/29/2010 10:32 AM EDT
To answer the questions above, the Tianhe-1a is fast becasuse 1) It has this 2x advantage in interconnect throughput and 2) it is using the very latest fast Intel and Nvidia processors (something others will leverage, too).
As for the future China supers, some are expected to use China's Longsoon-3, a 16-core processor probably available in 2011. I have not yet heard about any China graphics chips. Maybe someone else can chime in on that.
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Jack.L
10/29/2010 10:44 AM EDT
We graduate accountants and lawyers, they graduate engineers ... what do we think is going to happen with technology?
Remember when we used to manufacture things in North America (Europe still does a bit)??? What happened? As opposed to spending money on engineering to build better machines to manufacture cheaper, we just shipped the work to low wage countries like China.... who can now afford to train engineers.
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Kaiser Silicon
11/2/2010 12:41 PM EDT
We can't forget the rather perverse situation with H1-B visas, especially in this economic environment, where indiginous engineers are routinely displaced by foregin born engineers. Our native population isn't rewarded as well as foreign born engineers. Ditto for engineers, regardless of background, once you get into your 40's. I'm not for eliminating foreign born engineers in the US, but when we have a huge pool of out of work engineers, and foreign engineers are still being brought into the US, it seems sort of hard to justify, and probably makes people consider other careers like law and accounting more attractive.
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przemek
10/29/2010 3:47 PM EDT
As for software, Linux practically has a monopoly: 90%+ share. Windows has 5 machines in the top 500, and I couldn't even find them (they are probably towards the end of the list):
http://www.top500.org/overtime/list/35/osfam
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nicolas.mokhoff
10/29/2010 6:43 PM EDT
Glad you mention the "Russians" Eric. In my travels to the institutes at the then Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow in the early 1990s, I was fortunate to be shown their Elbrus supercomputer and was amazed that it was one of the first Russian supercomputers to use LSI chips and a VLIW architecture. What made it fast and efficient were the efficient software algorithms, said Boris Babayan, its chief designer. This was the case in all hi-tech institutes: they made good on working with the hardware they had by compensating with superior software. Too bad the cold war mentality continues as China leaps forward. It could still be the start of a beautiful friendship (Casablanca). Interested in the Elbrus?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_(computer)
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docdivakar
10/29/2010 8:58 PM EDT
@Eric Verhulst_Altreonic, @Nic_Mokhoff:
Yes, writing better and efficient software does also make a difference, up to some extent. In the mid-nineties when engineers in US had access to Pentium-based computers, people in Russia were writing programs on x286 machines that ran faster!
Housed in 80 cabinets, the Tianhe-I comprises of 14,336 Xeon X5670 processors &7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs. Each compute node has two Intel Xeon processors with 32GB of memory and the total memory of the whole system is 98,304GB. F
@Rick_Merrit: it was good to see you at CDN Live! San Jose. You mention in the article about Galaxy interconnect chipset (supposed to be twice as fast as QDR IB which is 10Gb per lane) but the physical medium is not mentioned -was it copper or fiber? The IBTA is already forging ahead with EDR (26Gb per lane) standards work in which I am sure Mellanox is actively participating. Therefore it is not surprising to see a Chinese development on 20Gb/lane chipset (PHY?), but I would be curious to know more on the switching they employed in their latest supercomputer. The previous version of Tianhe-I (SC-09 presentation) used a two-stage InfiniBand QDR switches.
Dr. MP Divakar
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Luis Sanchez
10/29/2010 9:17 PM EDT
Quite interesting to see that Linux does "rule" in supercomputing. And though at first I thought it was an awkward question, now I think it calls for an intelligent answer... I'm reffering to that question about comparing the supercomputers against the average as my laptop... I suppose they can't be compared with ordinary applications like word processors and spreadsheets. But how about a number crunching contest!... yikes! - says the little one.
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Chee Choy
10/30/2010 8:36 AM EDT
Why China can be first when the time come ahead. Simply they have the capital collected from the world largest population others do not have this advantage, this fund could make fastest train, fastest supercomputer etc..... when the time come, it is not that surprise their collective fund from their people is an advantage to do a lot of things than other countries not able to do it.
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jaybus
10/30/2010 8:59 AM EDT
With distributed processors, and particularly using the MPI interface, interconnect throughput and latency are critical performance factors. This is why Intel's SCC processor is so interesting. It's not that it is a 48-core chip, it is that the cores are networked on-chip with a network throughput of 256 GB/s. That's gigabytes per second, not Gbits/s, so around 16 times as fast as the new Chinese interconnect. Of course, that only provides a high speed interconnect for the on-chip cores. However, Intel's silicon photonics technology looks promising for chip-to-chip links in the 1 Tbit/s range or faster. Things are looking up in the supercomputer world.
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sranje
10/30/2010 10:54 AM EDT
Our more noble priorities are to build 10 more aircraft carrier groups, to award brown-shirt-like ignorance and non-tolerance, to outspend on "defense" all other countries put together, to ignore large scale war crimes in our wars of aggression -- in summary, truly oh sooo Christian values and a classic case of an obsolete and disintegrating "empire" no longer "chosen" to "rule and suffer"
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yalanand
10/30/2010 11:36 AM EDT
This is super achievement by China, this is high time US should wake up. But what exactly was the purpose to build this, is it show its might or they needed this really for some scientific research ?
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Zaphod Beeblebrox
10/31/2010 9:11 PM EDT
Probably the same reason the yanks and others build them. A combination of scientific reasearch and to build the biggest/fastest/smallest etc of whatever they are working on.
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rick.merritt
10/30/2010 11:31 PM EDT
@Dr. Divakar: They use an optical media, but that's all I know. It would be great to get a tech paper on the Galaxy interconnect, but I have no connections with the Tianjin researchers--yet!
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tfc
11/2/2010 1:54 AM EDT
Oh well. When I was going to the university for engineering in the early 00s, most of the MAs and PHDs students were oversea Asians in their 20's. Many of the professors were of oversea Asian origins. I couldn't get two pennies to rub together for my education or get work as I went to school (or after) so I spent many years earning money to fund my education. I received my BS in my 40's. Gee, I wonder why everything is ending up over there?
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tfc
11/2/2010 10:41 PM EDT
Correction: I did get a Pell grant. Other than that, nothing.
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Duane Benson
11/4/2010 4:57 PM EDT
re: the H1-B comment - One of the strongest competitive advantages that this country has had through out the years is the diversity of its brain-trust. Getting folks in from all over the world brings new and fresh ideas in. It keeps us locals from getting complacent - competition makes people work harder.
I suspect there is plenty wrong with the H1-B program as there is with most government programs, but that's why in this country, we value the individual over the government. That's why we have an inherent limitation in our level of trust in the government. Still, one of the major values of the H1-B program is that it brings very bright folks over here to contribute to society, pay taxes and help companies to be more successful.
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