China made a new move in the race supercomputers
China is financing the development of the world's first prototype supercomputer for exaflops computing. The system speed will be the quintillion of operations per second. The country will direct such power to support the program of marine research.
/ Flickr / kosheahan / CC
In the ranking of the most productive computers in the world, presented in June at the International Conference of Supercomputers in Frankfurt, the development of China has the first two lines. They are occupied by Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2, which have a performance of 125.43 petaflops and 54.9 petaflops, respectively.
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Having established itself at the leading positions, China became interested in creating the world's first ex-flop supercomputer capable of performing billions of floating-point calculations per second. This power is useful for demanding research in the South China Sea.
For this, China is ready to finance at least three competing development teams: Sugon, the PLA Defense Science and Technology University, which developed the Tianhe supercomputers, and Sunway, which was engaged in TahiuLight. The authorities want to choose a project that will provide the highest performance and will be ready for immediate use after creation. It is expected that spending on a supercomputer will be from one to two billion yuan (150-300 million dollars).
The base for the super-scale structure will be the city ​​of Qingdao, the largest port in Shandong Province, as there are many institutions related to ocean research. In addition, the world's largest marine data center is being built here, which will be directly connected to the ocean monitoring system.
China has invested heavily in deep-sea mining and is implementing a global project of the new Silk Road. As a result of all the initiatives, the country will certainly need to collect and process huge amounts of data.
Researchers are confident that exaflops calculations will help to carry out integrated modeling of the ocean and solve complex problems. Feng Liqiang (Feng Liqiang), head of the Marine Science Data Center in Qingdao, believes that the supercomputer will be able to collect all the data related to the marine environment for a comprehensive analysis. As a result, China will achieve oceanic simulations with unprecedented high resolution, which will help generate reliable predictions on issues such as climate change on the planet.
Since the creation of a supercomputer is of strategic importance, and Titan from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, is located on the fourth line in the ranking of the fastest devices, in June, the States Department of Energy decided to close the gap with China. It announced the financing of six companies - AMD, Cray, HPE, IBM, Intel and Nvidia - in the amount of $ 258 million in the field of exaflops computing. The construction of the current prototype is scheduled for 2021.
To slow down competitors, in 2015 the US government even banned Intel from supplying its fastest chips for supercomputer projects in China.
Despite this, China announced the launch of a prototype Tianhe-3 device for genetic research in the first quarter of 2017, reaching full capacity by 2020. Today, the country promises to demonstrate all the capabilities of the new exaflops computer in 2019.
At the same time, in August, Oak Ridge National Laboratory began assembling Summit - IBM-NVIDIA system, which has the chance to become the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It is expected that the system will be available for scientific research by January 2019.
/ wikimedia / Titan / PD
Exaflops supercomputers will give impetus to science, allowing you to create high-precision simulations of biological systems and form realistic models for building reliable forecasts (climate, social economy).
According to Tom Dunning, a professor of chemistry at the University of Washington, exaflops supercomputers are closely related to national security, as law enforcement organizations collect huge amounts of data that require processing. Thanks to more processing power, this information can be quickly analyzed to assess and predict potential threats.
On the way to launching a supercomputer both in China and in the USA there are several global problems. Such devices emit a tremendous amount of heat, which does not allow the computer to achieve maximum performance and brings with it huge electricity bills.
The second point is the development of an architecture that would allow hundreds of thousands of processors and memory chips to efficiently interact. The third difficulty lies in the lack of software that can scale to one quintillon calculations per second.
Steve Conway (Steve Conway), from the scientific agency Riken, notes that the “race for exaflops”, one way or another, advances the technology of supercomputers and artificial intelligence. He predicts that the existing problems will be overcome, and the first exaflops supercomputers will appear in the list of 500 fastest computers in 2021, and by 2023 they will become commonplace.
Even today, Chinese Sunway TaihuLight has achieved a simulation of the Universe with 10 trillion digital particles, and scientists from the University of Zurich have reconstructed 25 billion virtual galaxies consisting of 2 trillion digital particles. In any case, in the race for exaflops countries will benefit primarily science.
PS What else do we write in our blog:
/ Flickr / kosheahan / CC
In the ranking of the most productive computers in the world, presented in June at the International Conference of Supercomputers in Frankfurt, the development of China has the first two lines. They are occupied by Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2, which have a performance of 125.43 petaflops and 54.9 petaflops, respectively.
')
Having established itself at the leading positions, China became interested in creating the world's first ex-flop supercomputer capable of performing billions of floating-point calculations per second. This power is useful for demanding research in the South China Sea.
For this, China is ready to finance at least three competing development teams: Sugon, the PLA Defense Science and Technology University, which developed the Tianhe supercomputers, and Sunway, which was engaged in TahiuLight. The authorities want to choose a project that will provide the highest performance and will be ready for immediate use after creation. It is expected that spending on a supercomputer will be from one to two billion yuan (150-300 million dollars).
The base for the super-scale structure will be the city ​​of Qingdao, the largest port in Shandong Province, as there are many institutions related to ocean research. In addition, the world's largest marine data center is being built here, which will be directly connected to the ocean monitoring system.
China has invested heavily in deep-sea mining and is implementing a global project of the new Silk Road. As a result of all the initiatives, the country will certainly need to collect and process huge amounts of data.
Researchers are confident that exaflops calculations will help to carry out integrated modeling of the ocean and solve complex problems. Feng Liqiang (Feng Liqiang), head of the Marine Science Data Center in Qingdao, believes that the supercomputer will be able to collect all the data related to the marine environment for a comprehensive analysis. As a result, China will achieve oceanic simulations with unprecedented high resolution, which will help generate reliable predictions on issues such as climate change on the planet.
Exaflops races
Since the creation of a supercomputer is of strategic importance, and Titan from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, is located on the fourth line in the ranking of the fastest devices, in June, the States Department of Energy decided to close the gap with China. It announced the financing of six companies - AMD, Cray, HPE, IBM, Intel and Nvidia - in the amount of $ 258 million in the field of exaflops computing. The construction of the current prototype is scheduled for 2021.
To slow down competitors, in 2015 the US government even banned Intel from supplying its fastest chips for supercomputer projects in China.
Despite this, China announced the launch of a prototype Tianhe-3 device for genetic research in the first quarter of 2017, reaching full capacity by 2020. Today, the country promises to demonstrate all the capabilities of the new exaflops computer in 2019.
At the same time, in August, Oak Ridge National Laboratory began assembling Summit - IBM-NVIDIA system, which has the chance to become the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It is expected that the system will be available for scientific research by January 2019.
/ wikimedia / Titan / PD
Exaflops supercomputers will give impetus to science, allowing you to create high-precision simulations of biological systems and form realistic models for building reliable forecasts (climate, social economy).
According to Tom Dunning, a professor of chemistry at the University of Washington, exaflops supercomputers are closely related to national security, as law enforcement organizations collect huge amounts of data that require processing. Thanks to more processing power, this information can be quickly analyzed to assess and predict potential threats.
Exaflops Supercomputer Problems
On the way to launching a supercomputer both in China and in the USA there are several global problems. Such devices emit a tremendous amount of heat, which does not allow the computer to achieve maximum performance and brings with it huge electricity bills.
The second point is the development of an architecture that would allow hundreds of thousands of processors and memory chips to efficiently interact. The third difficulty lies in the lack of software that can scale to one quintillon calculations per second.
Steve Conway (Steve Conway), from the scientific agency Riken, notes that the “race for exaflops”, one way or another, advances the technology of supercomputers and artificial intelligence. He predicts that the existing problems will be overcome, and the first exaflops supercomputers will appear in the list of 500 fastest computers in 2021, and by 2023 they will become commonplace.
Even today, Chinese Sunway TaihuLight has achieved a simulation of the Universe with 10 trillion digital particles, and scientists from the University of Zurich have reconstructed 25 billion virtual galaxies consisting of 2 trillion digital particles. In any case, in the race for exaflops countries will benefit primarily science.
PS What else do we write in our blog:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/337898/
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