Dona Crawford on China's Rise to Supercomputer Power

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Dona Crawford, Associate Director for Computation at LLNL and one of our Rock Stars of HPC, spoke recently at the Commonwealth Club on the topic of China’s rise on the TOP500.

While the Chinese Tiahne-1A computer system is based on U.S. components, it uses many Chinese-made components and China’s goal is to be able to build supercomputers entirely based on indigenous technology. China has made consistent HPC investments over the last 10 years that resulted in its current position in HPC, and they have plans for the future. China has put next generation exascale computing, using indigenous technology, on a fast track, planning to have systems available by the end of this decade (2020). In the next five-year plan, China expects to have many petascale systems, at least one of which will be 100PF. They have budgeted $2 billion for this. Their following five-year plan from 2016 to 2020 takes them to between 1 and 10 exaflops.

Crawford goes on to say that the U.S. is still a supercomputing leader in many dimensions and that drive for faster systems for simulation is a never-ending quest: “When we have enough computing capability to provide a digital proxy of the entire universe, we will be done.” Read the Full Story.