Xinhua News Agency, Nanjing, June 20th: One minute on the phone counts as 32 years — — Revealing the World’s Fastest Supercomputer "Shenwei Light of Taihu Lake"
Xinhua News Agency reporters Jiang Fang and Cai Yugao
On June 20th, the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany announced the new TOP500 list of global supercomputers. The "Shenwei Taihu Light" developed by the National Center for Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology won the first place with nearly three times the operation speed. What’s more exciting is that the system has realized the localization of all core components including the processor.
How fast is the computing speed of the new overlord of supercomputers? What does full localization mean? Has China Supercomputing reached the top of the world? Xinhua News Agency reporter walked into the Wuxi Center of National Supercomputing, which is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the system, and unveiled the mystery of "Shenwei Taihu Light" for you.
What’s the feeling of the fastest computing in the world? One minute of operation is equivalent to 32 years on earth.
The peak performance of the system is 125.436PFlops, ranking first in the world;
The continuous performance is 93.015PFlops, ranking first in the world;
The performance-to-power ratio is 6051 mflops/w, which is still the first in the world.
The news from the International Supercomputing Conference is confusing just by looking at the data.
"Simply put, the one-minute computing power of this system is equivalent to 7.2 billion people around the world using calculators to calculate continuously for 32 years; If mainstream laptops or personal desktops produced in 2016 are used as a reference, ‘ Light of Taihu Lake ’ It is equivalent to more than 2 million ordinary computers. " Yang Guangwen, director of Wuxi National Supercomputing Center, introduced.
Walking into the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center, in a room of 1,000 square meters, the reporter saw the "real body" of "Shenwei Taihu Light":
It consists of 40 computing cabinets and 8 network cabinets. Each computing cabinet is slightly larger than a household two-door refrigerator. When the cabinet door is opened, four super nodes consisting of 32 computing plug-ins are distributed in it. Each plug-in consists of four operation node boards, and one operation node board contains two "Shenwei 26010" high-performance processors. One cabinet has 1024 processors, and the whole "Shenwei Taihu Light" has 40,960 processors.
"Each processor is equivalent to the computing power of more than 20 commonly used laptops, and more than 40,000 pieces are assembled together, and the speed can be imagined." Yang Guangwen said.
Global supercomputing, only fast and unbreakable. The significance of working on supercomputing research is not only "speed war", but more importantly, winning "application war".
Fu Haohuan, deputy director of the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center, introduced that relying on the "Shenwei Light of Taihu Lake", the research team with the theme of Tsinghua University realized the numerical simulation of the global 10-kilometer high-resolution earth system for the first time, which will comprehensively improve China’s ability to cope with extreme climate and natural disasters; The numerical simulation results of the return path of "Tiangong-1" by the National Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory are exciting and will provide accurate predictions for the smooth return of "Tiangong-1". The drug screening and disease mechanism research carried out by Shanghai Institute of Drugs completed the routine calculation in just two weeks, which greatly accelerated the progress of drug design in leukemia, cancer and avian influenza … …
From "glass room" to "restricted sale" of 25 square centimeters, completely breaking the 30-year technical blockade.
Thirty years ago, supercomputer users in China had a mysterious "glass room": Americans sold a supercomputer to China, wrapped it in opaque glass, and technicians from China were not allowed to enter without authorization.
Professor Wang Lanning from the Institute of Global Change and Earth System Science of Beijing Normal University still remembers this "technology enclave" in China. "Only a few authorized scientists in the country can enter the glass room, and it is under the supervision of Americans. Once the program runs, the machine is locked back to the glass room immediately. The so-called supercomputing speed seems to be a high-performance computer at best today, but it was an unattainable peak for China at that time. "
In the 1980s, China has gradually entered the ranks of countries that independently design and manufacture supercomputers, but the shortcomings of key components and technologies such as core processors can only be controlled by others, which directly leads to the fact that although China is a "big buyer" of foreign supercomputers, it cannot have the matching "bargaining power".
Stepping into the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan", with the key support of the National 863 Project, China’s supercomputing development has continuously made breakthroughs. "Tianhe II" won "six consecutive championships", while the list of top 500 supercomputers in the world is getting longer and longer, which has aroused the vigilance of the United States. In April, 2015, the US government announced that four China organizations related to supercomputers were included in the restricted export list, with the purpose of locking up the rapid development of supercomputers in China through restricted sales.
It is the incentive brought by this blockade that has enabled China to make great efforts to develop fully localized "Shenwei" series supercomputers until it reached the top of the international list.
As a result, the thin block "Shenwei 26010", which is only 5 cm square, has not only become the heart of "Shenwei Taihu Light", but also become a sharp weapon for China’s independent research and development to break the 30-year technical blockade. Between the square inches of 25 square centimeters, 260 computing cores and billions of transistors are integrated, reaching more than 3 trillion calculations per second. The computing power of a single chip is equivalent to three supercomputers ranked first in the world in 2000.
Yang Guangwen said that there has always been a controversy about whether we should independently develop the core processor. Some people say that if we haven’t done it for so many years, we should simply stop doing it and "adopt" one. There are also voices that the high-speed rail model of introduction, absorption and re-innovation is very good. Why do we have to close the door and engage in independent ecology? "If we don’t adhere to the completely independent ecology, we can’t do it for more than ten years, and then we can’t do it for more than ten years. It is impossible to have the great power of core indicators going hand in hand today." Liang Jun, deputy director of the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center, said.
From the "six consecutive championships" to the first billion China supercomputing, there is still a gap from the top of the world
Supercomputers, known as "the sharp weapon of the country", are the embodiment of the comprehensive strength of the country’s science and technology. From high-end materials, to life sciences and biotechnology, to deep-sea exploration and space technology, it is inseparable from the support of supercomputing. As soon as the good news came out, some people thought that China Supercomputer had "firmly" stood at the top of the world from now on. Is that really the case?
Yang Guangwen said that it is undeniable that the success of "Shenwei Light of Taihu Lake" indicates that China’s supercomputer research and development capability has already reached the world’s leading level, but there is still a clear gap between China and developed countries in terms of technical reserves and system stability.
The battle for speed is the most direct confrontation in the field of supercomputing. Compared with the glory of "Tianhe No.2" and "six consecutive championships", it is extremely difficult for Shenwei Taihu Light to occupy the first place in the world for a long time. In July last year, the United States launched the "National Strategic Computing Plan" with the goal of building the fastest computer in the world by 2025.
"In the next five to ten years, from one billion times per second to one billion times per second is the decisive place for supercomputer development." Relevant researchers from the National Center for Parallel Computing said that although supercomputing countries are deploying, there are many key technical links that need to be solved. Taking energy consumption as an example, the annual electricity consumption of Shenwei Taihu Light reaches 15 MW, which is equivalent to the electricity consumption of three Tsinghua University. Even if billions of times can be achieved with the existing technology, the energy consumption will be very amazing.
More importantly, no matter how fast the speed is, the development of supercomputing is always for "application", and this is still the shortcoming of the current development of supercomputing in China.
Zhang Jian, a researcher at the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that China’s ability to solve problems with supercomputing systems has been insufficient for a long time, and related commercial application software is still monopolized by foreign countries, and it needs to be further improved in software development, application development and personnel training. Only by transforming the advantage of "making good" into the advantage of "making good use" can we truly promote industrial innovation and upgrading.