China operates a number of supercomputer centers. In the mid-2010s, Chinese supercomputers occupied top spots on the TOP500. [1] Since 2019, after the U.S. began levying sanctions on several Chinese companies involving with supercomputing, less public information is available on the state of supercomputing in China. [2]
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The origins of these centers go back to 1980s, [3] when the State Planning Commission, the State Science and Technology Commission and the World Bank jointly launched a project to develop networking and supercomputer facilities in China. In addition to network facilities, the project included three supercomputer centers. [4] The progress of supercomputing in China has been rapid; the country's most powerful supercomputer placed 43rd in November 2002 (DeepComp 1800 [5] ), 11th by November 2003 (DeepComp 6800 [6] ), 10th by June 2004 (Dawning 4000A [7] ), and by November 2010 (Tianhe-1A [8] ) held top spot. China would go on to fall behind Japan in June 2011 until June 2013 when the country's most powerful supercomputer once again clocked in as the world record. [9]
Prior to the Sunway TaihuLight, Chinese supercomputers have used "off the shelf" processors, e.g. Tianhe-I uses thousands of Intel and Nvidia chips, and uses the Linux operating system which is open-source software. However, to avoid possible future technology embargo restrictions, the Chinese are developing their own processors such as the Loongson, a MIPS type processor. [10] [9]
According to the MIT Technology Review , the Loongson processor would power the Dawning supercomputers by 2012, producing a line of totally Chinese-made supercomputers that reach petaflop speeds. [11]
In April 2021, seven Chinese supercomputing entities were added to the Entity List of the United States Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. [12]
The Supercomputing Center of the China Academy of Sciences (SCCAS) is a support service unit affiliated to the Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the origin going back to 1980s. [3] The Supercomputing Center of the China Academy of Sciences (SCCAS) provides academic support functions to the National Centers. SCCAS, which is located in Beijing, is the Northern main node and operation center for China National Grid (CNGrid). [13]
Yinhe-1 was independently designed and manufactured as the first leading China's supercomputer in 1983 with a performance level of 100 MFLOPS. [14]
Shanghai Supercomputer Center (SSC) was established in December 2000. It was the first high-performance computing public service platform in China and the fastest supercomputer in China at that time. [15] [16] The Shanghai Supercomputer Center operates the Magic Cube-II supercomputer that runs at 400 teraflops. [17] [18]
The National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin is one of the main centers and is the first state-level supercomputing center approved in May 2009. [19] It houses the Tianhe-I supercomputer which in October 2010 became the top speed record holder in the world by consistently operating at 2.507 petaflops. The Tianjin Computer Institute had been active as far back as 1984 when it developed the 16-bit TQ-0671 microcomputer system. [20] A commercial affiliate of the Tianjin center had previously made the PHPC100 personal supercomputer in 2008 which was about twice the size of a normal desktop computer, but had 40 times the speed. In 2010 a second generation model was released. [21]
The National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen is the second national supercomputing center after the one based in Tianjin and houses the second fastest machine in China, and the third fastest in the world. [22] In May 2010 the Nebulae computer in Shenzhen placed second on the Top 500 supercomputer list, after the Cray computer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. [23]
Foundations for a new major branch of the National Supercomputing Center (国家超级计算中心 Guójiā Chāojíjìsuàn Zhōngxīn) were laid in Hunan University, Changsha on 28 November 2010 as the first National Supercomputing Center in Central China and the third National Supercomputing Center in China apart from the two centers which are located in Tianjin and Shenzhen. [24] The National Supercomputing Changsha Center is managed and operated by Hunan University. [25] It operates the Tianhe-1A Hunan Solution – NUDT YH MPP supercomputer which runs at 1342 teraflops. [26] It was the most powerful supercomputer in the world at that time from its operation in November 2010 to November 2011. [27] [28]
The National Supercomputing Center in Jinan operates the Sunway BlueLight MPP supercomputer that runs at 795 teraflops. [29]
The National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou operates the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world (as of June 2018) Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2), [30] which runs at 33,000 teraflops. It also operates the Tianhe-1A Guangzhou Solution – NUDT YH MPP supercomputer that runs at 211 teraflops. [31]
The National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi houses the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, the 4th most powerful supercomputer in the world as of November 2020. It is in the Binhu District, along the shores of Lake Tai, hence the name.
In December 2020, the National Supercomputing Zhengzhou Center was passed the inspection for operation, becoming the seventh national supercomputing center in China. [32]
In 2020, the National Supercomputing Kunshan Center successfully passed the acceptance of experts, becoming the second supercomputing center in Jiangsu Province and the eighth supercomputing center in China. [33]
In September 2020, the Chengdu Supercomputing Center was officially completed and put into operation. [34]
A supercomputer is a type of 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, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Columbia was a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics (SGI) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), installed in 2004 at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility located at Moffett Field in California. Named in honor of the crew who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, it increased NASA's supercomputing capacity ten-fold for the agency's science, aeronautics and exploration programs.
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 benchmarks, 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 based in the People's Republic of China. The company is a spin-off from research done at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and still has close links to it.
Windows HPC Server 2008, released by Microsoft on 22 September 2008, is the successor product to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Like WCCS, Windows HPC Server 2008 is designed for high-end applications that require high performance computing clusters. This version of the server software is claimed to efficiently scale to thousands of cores. It includes features unique to HPC workloads: a new high-speed NetworkDirect RDMA, highly efficient and scalable cluster management tools, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) job scheduler, an MPI library based on open-source MPICH2, and cluster interoperability through standards such as the High Performance Computing Basic Profile (HPCBP) specification produced by the Open Grid Forum (OGF).
The National University of Defense Technology is a national public research university headquartered in Kaifu, Changsha, Hunan, China. It is affiliated with the Central Military Commission. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Construction. With the predecessor founded in 1953 as the People's Liberation Army Military Academy of Engineering (中国人民解放军军事工程学院) in Harbin, the institution was officially established in 1978 in Changsha, Hunan.
Jaguar or OLCF-2 was a petascale supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The massively parallel Jaguar had a peak performance of just over 1,750 teraFLOPS. It had 224,256 x86-based AMD Opteron processor cores, and operated with a version of Linux called the Cray Linux Environment. Jaguar was a Cray XT5 system, a development from the Cray XT4 supercomputer.
Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and was one of the few petascale supercomputers in the world.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.
This list compares various amounts of computing power in instructions per second organized by order of magnitude in FLOPS.
The National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin is a supercomputing facility 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.
The National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen houses the second fastest machine in China, and the third fastest in the world. 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.
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.
Mira is a retired petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. As of November 2017, it is listed on TOP500 as the 11th fastest supercomputer in the world, while it debuted June 2012 in 3rd place. It has a performance of 8.59 petaflops (LINPACK) and consumes 3.9 MW. The supercomputer was constructed by IBM for Argonne National Laboratory's Argonne Leadership Computing Facility with the support of the United States Department of Energy, and partially funded by the National Science Foundation. Mira was used for scientific research, including studies in the fields of material science, climatology, seismology, and computational chemistry. The supercomputer was used initially for sixteen projects selected by the Department of Energy.
Tianhe-2 or TH-2 is a 3.86-petaflop supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.
The National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou houses Tianhe-2, which is currently the seventh 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 2023, is ranked 11th 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 6.1 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.
