OceanLight, a Chinese exascale supercomputer that was rejected for inclusion in the Top500, is back in the spotlight as a finalist for the Gordon Bell Awards. The Gordon Bell Prize is an annual award that recognizes “Hi, his outstanding achievement in performance computing” and awards his $10,000 endowment to the winner, selected from a group of five finalists. Ocean Light, operated by the University of Science and Technology of China, head to head again It features Western supercomputing achievements such as Frontier and Summit, as well as the Japanese Arm-based Fugaku.
OceanLight’s supercomputing chops are impressive, especially considering its technology. In addition to being an exascale-class supercomputer, OceanLight is one of the few computers in the world today, but it does not have the same facilities as those made outside of China, which is under severe sanctions. For example, China is barred from accessing cutting-edge manufacturing technology. This makes us rely entirely on our in-house manufacturing capabilities to provide most of the components and technology needed to build such a giant machine.
This means that OceanLight is built with mostly deprecated technology compared to today’s best GPU and best CPU enthusiasts can get their hands on. Uses AMD MI300 APU. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), a domestic CPU manufacturer in China, leveraged his 14nm process for its SW26010-Pro CPU to build OceanLight’s exascale capabilities.
according to Very educated math from Nextplatform, each SW26010-Pro CPU can perform 14.03 teraflops of computation with FP64 or FP32 precision and 55.3 teraflops of computation with BF16 or FP16 precision. Extracting data from previous Gordon Bell Prize entries in which the system participated, OceanLight is estimated to feature a 107,520-node architecture with one of his SW26010-Pro per node for a total of 41.93 million cores.
Each cabinet can support 40 nodes, for a total of 105 cabinets. Also, according to Gordon Bell’s entry this year, a supercomputing workload simulating 2.5 billion atoms and their interactions invoked 28.1 million OceanLight cores.
China is leveraging a full range of technologies to improve both its quantum and supercomputing capabilities. Also, the country does not shy away from increasing power consumption (mainly coal-based) and material requirements resulting from scaling old and unadvanced technology. Again, where there are pockets of will and country pushing, there is a way forward.
