The United States has regained the coveted speed crown in computing with Tennessee’s powerful new supercomputer. This is a technology milestone that plays a major role in science, medicine and other disciplines.
Frontier, the name of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s giant machine, is a series of standardized tests used by researchers to rank supercomputers on Monday, with 1 trillion operations per second (1 billion calculations). ) Was declared to be the first machine to demonstrate performance. As scientists say, a few years ago, the US Department of Energy promised $ 1.8 billion to build three systems with its “exascale” capabilities.
However, be careful with the crown. Some experts believe that the frontier was defeated in exascale racing by two systems in China.The operators of these systems have not submitted test results for evaluation by the so-called supervising scientists. Top 500 ranking.. Experts said they suspected that tensions between the United States and China might be the reason why the Chinese did not submit test results.
“There are rumors that there is something in China,” said Jack Dongarra, a prominent professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee, who leads the Top500 initiative. “There is no official one.”
Supercomputers have long been the flash point of international competition. Room-sized machines were initially built for code decoding and weapon design, but now also play a major role in vaccine development, car design testing, and climate change modeling. ..
This field was dominated by US technology for decades, but China has become the dominant force. So the system called Sunway TaihuLight was ranked fastest in the world from 2016 to 2018. China occupied 173 systems on the latest Top500 list, compared to 126 machines in the United States.
Japan is a small but still a strong competitor. In June 2020, a system called Fugaku in Kobe took first place and replaced Oak Ridge’s IBM system.
Frontier returns its top position to the lab. A system built by HewlettPackard Enterprise using two Advanced MicroDevices chips was more than twice as fast as Fugaku in tests used by Top500 organizations.
At an online briefing at an industry event in Germany, Oak Ridge Director Thomas Zakaria said: “It reminds us that we can still chase something bigger than us.”
According to Zakaria, building a system consisting of 74 cabinets, each weighing 8,000 pounds, was made even more difficult by the problems of component availability during the pandemic and supply chain crisis. But he predicted, for example, that Frontier would have a rapid and significant impact on studying the impact of Covid and helping to transition to a cleaner energy source.
Chinese researchers participated in the ranking process. However, as the United States has taken a series of steps to slow China’s technological progress, the country has adopted unobtrusive ones to accelerate the progress of supercomputers. ..
However, China has made great strides in designing its own microprocessors, which are the key to the advancement of supercomputers. David Kahaner, an authority in the field who heads the Asian Technical Information Program, reported details last year on two exascale-class supercomputers that said they were using Chinese chip technology.
According to a presentation shared by Kahaner at the technical conference, one is the successor to the previous Sunway machine called OceanLight. Another machine, the Tianhe-3, inherits a system called the Tianhe-1A, which was the first Chinese machine to reach # 1 on the Top500 list in 2010.
Further evidence that China has broken the barriers to exascale is honored by the Association for Computing Machinery as a group of 14 Chinese researchers simulated quantum computing circuits in a new Sunway system operating at exascale speeds. It became clear when we received the Gordon Bell Prize award. .. The computational work, estimated to take 10,000 years on Oak Ridge’s fastest and older supercomputers, took 304 seconds on a Chinese system, researchers report in a technical paper.
Steve Conway, an analyst at Hyperion Research, said: “A lot of speculation is that they don’t want to attract US sanctions anymore.”
Conway and other experts said they believe the new Chinese machine chips were manufactured in Taiwan. This also applies to the frontier’s major chips. He said China is far behind in its advanced chip manufacturing capabilities.
Oak Ridge machines can not only help scientists, but also help suppliers disseminate some new products. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which acquired supercomputer pioneer Cray in 2019, provided a networking technology called Sling Shot that had a significant impact on Frontier’s performance, Zacharia said.
AMD has also contributed not only to microprocessors, but also to a type of graphics processing chip sold primarily for supercomputers by rival Nvidia. The same two AMD chips were selected for an exascale system called El Capitan, which will be installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in 2023.
The third exascale machine at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which uses three Intel chips, was originally planned to ship in 2021. However, due to Intel’s manufacturing issues, the system was delayed.
