China has built its first supercomputer based entirely on homegrown microprocessors, a major step in breaking the country’s reliance on Western technology for high performance computing.
China’s National Supercomputer Center in Jinan unveiled the computer last Thursday, according to a report from the country’s state-run press. The supercomputer uses 8,704 Shenwei 1600 microprocessors, which were developed by a design center in Shanghai, called the National High Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center.
Details of the microprocessors and the design center were not immediately available.
The supercomputer has a theoretical peak speed of 1.07 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), and a sustained performance of 0.79 petaflops when measured with the Linpack benchmark. This could place it at number 13 in the world’s top 500 supercomputing list.
A report from The New York Times said the supercomputer’s name in English was the Sunway BlueLight MPP.
China is increasingly investing in supercomputing technology. Last November, its Tianhe-1A supercomputer briefly grabbed the spot as the world’s most powerful, but the computer used chips from Intel and Nvidia. The Tianhe-1A has a theoretical peak speed of 4.7 petaflops and a sustained performance of 2.5 petaflops.
China currently has 61 supercomputers on the top 500 list. Japan’s "K Computer" is currently ranked first in the top 500 list, after bumping Tianhe-1A to the second place.
IDG News Service
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers