“Achieving the No. 1 ranking is significant for China’s economic and energy security, not to mention national security. With 125 petaFLOP/s (peak), China’s supercomputer is firmly on the path toward applying incredible modeling and simulation capabilities enabling them to spur innovations in the fields of clean energy, manufacturing, and yes, nuclear weapons and other military applications. The strong probability of China gaining advantages in these areas should be setting off loud alarms, but it is hard to see what the U.S. is going to do differently to respond.”
China Leads TOP500 with Home-grown Technology
July 12, 2016 by
In this special guest feature, Robert Roe from Scientific Computing World writes that the new #1 system on the TOP500 is using home-grown processors to shake up the supercomputer industry. “While the system does have a focus towards computation, as opposed to the more data-centric computing strategies that we have begun to see implemented in the US and Europe, it is most certainly not just a Linpack supercomputer. The report explains that there are already three applications running on the Sunway TaihuLight system which are finalists for the Gordon Bell Award at SC16.”
Thomas Sterling presents: HPC Achievement and Impact 2016
June 28, 2016 by
Thomas Sterling presented this keynote at ISC 2016 in Frankfurt. “Even as the hundred petaflops era is coming within sight, more dramatic programs to achieve exaflops capacity are now emerging with the expectation of this two orders of magnitude advance in the early part of the next decade. Yet the challenges of the end of Moore’s Law loom ever greater, threatening to impede further progress. Innovations in semiconductor technologies and processor socket architecture matched with application development environments improvements promise to overcome such barriers. This keynote presentation will deliver a rapid-fire summary of the major accomplishments of the last year that promises a renaissance in supercomputing in the immediate future.”
Mellanox Technology Accelerates the World’s Fastest Supercomputer
June 27, 2016 by
Today Mellanox announced that the company’s interconnect technology accelerates the world’s fastest supercomputer at the supercomputing center in Wuxi, China. The new number one supercomputer delivers 93 Petaflops (3 times higher compared to the previous top system), connecting nearly 41 thousand nodes and more than ten million CPU cores. The offloading architecture of the Mellanox interconnect solution is the key to providing world leading performance, scalability and efficiency, connecting the highest number of nodes and CPU cores within a single supercomputer.
Radio Free HPC Looks at Sunway TaihuLight – the World’s Fastest Supercomputer
June 20, 2016 by
In this podcast, Shahin Khan from OrionX joins the Radio Free HPC team for a look at the new TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. “The 93 Petaflop Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer is not a one-time effort from China. Not only do they now have the two top two supercomputers, China also sponsors the world’s largest state-sponsored Student Cluster Competition with over 170 university teams. The takeaway from today; China is serious about supercomputing, they are in it for the long haul, and they are willing to write the checks to make it happen.”
