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The National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen houses the second fastest machine in China, and the third fastest in the world. [1] In May 2010 the Nebulae computer in Shenzhen placed second on the TOP500 supercomputer list, after the Cray computer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. [2]
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over a hundred quadrillion FLOPS (petaFLOPS). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in China, the United States, the European Union, Taiwan and Japan to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
Sugon, officially Dawning Information Industry Company Limited, is a supercomputer manufacturer in the People's Republic of China. Its Dawning 4000A and Dawning 5000A clusters were both ranked tenth in June 2004 and November 2008 TOP500 lists respectively. Dawning has manufactured some of the fastest supercomputers in the world including Nebulae, the second fastest computer in the June 2010 TOP500 list. The Chinese Academy of Science still retains stock in the company.
The National University of Defense Technology, or People's Liberation Army National University of Defense Science and Technology, is a military academy and Class A Double First Class University located in Changsha, Hunan, China. It is under the direct leadership of China's Central Military Commission, and the dual management of the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Education. It is designated for Project 211 and Project 985, the two national plans facilitating the development of Chinese higher education. NUDT was instrumental in the development of the Tianhe-2 supercomputer.
In computing, petascale refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflops, i.e. one quadrillion floating point operations per second. The standard benchmark tool is LINPACK and Top500.org is the organization which tracks the fastest supercomputers. Some uniquely specialized petascale computers do not rank on the Top500 list since they cannot run LINPACK. This makes comparisons to ordinary supercomputers hard. The petaFLOP barrier was first broken in September 16, 2007 by the Folding@home project, used to fold proteins for medical research. Petascale supercomputers are planned to be succeeded by Exascale computers.
Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.5 petaFLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and is one of the few petascale supercomputers in the world.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of at least one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion (i.e. a quintillion) calculations per second. Such capacity represents a thousandfold increase over the first petascale computer that came into operation in 2008. (One exaflop is a thousand petaflops or a quintillion, 1018, double precision floating point operations per second.) At a supercomputing conference in 2009, Computerworld projected exascale implementation by 2018. Although the exascale wall for FLOPS was not broken in 2019, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory performed a 1.8×1018 operation calculation per second (which is not the same as 1.8×1018 flops) on the Summit OLCF-4 Supercomputer while analyzing genomic information in 2018. They were Gordon Bell Award winners at Supercomputing 2018. The exaFLOP barrier was first broken in March of 2020 by the Folding@home project, used to fold proteins for medical research.
Nebulae is a petascale supercomputer located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. Built from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel Xeon X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPUs, it has a peak performance of 1.271 petaflops using the LINPACK benchmark suite. Nebulae was ranked the second most powerful computer in the world in the June 2010 list of the fastest supercomputers according to TOP500. Nebulae has a theoretical peak performance of 2.9843 petaflops. This computer is used for multiple applications requiring advanced processing capabilities. It is ranked 10th among the June 2012 list of top500.org.
The National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin is located at the National Defense Science and Technology University in Tianjin, China. One of the fastest supercomputers in the world, Tianhe-1A, is located at the facility.
China operates a number of supercomputer centers which, altogether, hold 29.3% performance share of world's fastest 500 supercomputers.
India's Supercomputer Programme was started in late 1980s, precisely during the 3rd quarter of 1987, in New Delhi for Software, in Bangalore for Hardware, and in Pune for Firmware, while Sam Pitroda, Advisor to C-DOT, and C-DOT's Indigenous Architecture and Design Team constituted by its Senior Member Technical Staff / Senior Programme Managers including Mohan Subramaniyam alias Mohan Rose Ali, Periasamy Muthiah, and Leslie D'Souza had all worked hard at the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), after successfully completing their 3 years mission on designing the Nation's first ever indigenous C-DOT Digital Switching System - DSS, to create C-DOT's Indigenous Super-computing Machine called CHIPPS - C-DOT High-Performance Parallel Processing System, because the contracted Cray X-MP Supercomputers were denied for export to India which was under the Statesmanship and Stewardship of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, due to an arms embargo imposed by US on India during Ronald Reagan's Presidential Administration, for it was a dual-use technology and it could be used for developing indigenous Strategic Defense Systems by India.
Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer becoming the world's fastest in June 2011.
The main credit to supercomputers goes to the inventor of CDC -6600, Seymour Cray. The history of supercomputing goes back to the early 1920s in the United States with the IBM tabulators at Columbia University and a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC), designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day, such as the 1954 IBM NORC, the 1960 UNIVAC LARC, and the IBM 7030 Stretch and the Atlas, both in 1962.
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
The high performance supercomputing program started in mid-to-late 1980s in Pakistan. Supercomputing is a recent area of Computer science in which Pakistan has made progress, driven in part by the growth of the information technology age in the country. Developing on the ingenious supercomputer program started in 1980s when the deployment of the Cray supercomputers was initially denied.
Tianhe-2 or TH-2 is a 33.86-petaflops supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.
The Cray XC40 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Haswell Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Intel Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.
The National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou houses Tianhe-2, which is currently the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world, with a measured 33.86 petaflop/s. Tianhe-2 is operated by the National University of Defence Technology, and owned by the Chinese government.
The Sunway TaihuLight is a Chinese supercomputer which, as of November 2018, is ranked third in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as divine power, the light of Taihu Lake. This is nearly three times as fast as the previous Tianhe-2, which ran at 34 petaflops. As of June 2017, it is ranked as the 16th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the Green500, with an efficiency of 6.051 GFlops/watt. It was designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi in the city of Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, China.
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