Turing Award winner: China’s supercomputing capability may surpass all countries.
In June of this year, the international supercomputer ranking organization “TOP500” released its global supercomputing ranking list. The American E-class (performing a hundred billion billion floating-point operations per second) supercomputer “Frontier” continued to hold the top position, with the Japanese supercomputer “Fugaku” in second place and the Finnish supercomputer “LUMI” maintaining its third position after a system upgrade in November of last year.
In this ranking, the Chinese supercomputer “Sunway TaihuLight” ranked seventh, while “Tianhe-2” was in tenth place. At first glance, it might seem that China’s supercomputing development lags behind the top supercomputers in the United States, Japan, and Europe based on the ranking data alone. However, experts in the field of supercomputing point out that the list cannot truly reflect China’s actual level in the supercomputing domain, especially given the increasingly tense geopolitical situation in recent years.
According to a report by the South China Morning Post, high-performance computing pioneer Jack Dongarra mentioned, “It is well known that China has these computers, and they have been operational for some time. They have not run benchmark tests yet, but the community has a general understanding of their architecture and capabilities based on research papers describing the scientific knowledge of these machines.” Dongarra made these comments as part of an interview with the South China Morning Post after attending a seminar on exascale computing software and algorithms in Beijing in August 2023.
Official specifications and benchmarks for the new systems seem to be either unreported or at least difficult to find at this time. All performance data for the new systems is currently estimated based on the previous systems. According to Tom’s Hardware, the new Sunway Oceanlite system being constructed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi is expected to utilize 19.2 million cores and encompass 49,230 computing nodes. In comparison, the current top-ranked supercomputer Frontier uses AMD EPYC 64-core processors, totaling 8,699,904 CPU cores, making the Chinese supercomputer 2.2 times more powerful.
All Top500 machines are required to describe their architecture and component processors, GPUs, memory, and interconnects. This information is crucial for historical and performance comparisons. The current top-ranked Top500 system, according to the HPL benchmark, is the Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States, with 1.194 exaFLOPS.
The last top-ranked system submitted to Top500 by China was the Sunway TaihuLight computer, with a performance of 93.01 petaFLOPS, which held the top position from June 2013 to November 2017. As of September 2023, the system with 40,960 nodes based on the ShenWei SW26010 processor remains in the seventh position on the Top500 list.
The recent Sunway Oceanlite (equipped with 49,230 SW26010-Pro processors) and Tianhe-3 (featuring Arm Phytium’s FT-2000 CPUs and Matrix 2000 DSP accelerators) systems are both considered to have exascale capabilities. However, they have not been submitted to the Top500 list.
There could be several reasons for this. Dongarra suggests, “Perhaps having the first computer could be news and make China a focus of attention. This could lead to actions by the United States to further restrict technology flow to China.” He goes on to say, “However, China still produces more supercomputers than any other country. Supercomputers assembled in China with chips produced both domestically and from Western designs are sold worldwide, including in the United States.
The U.S. sanctions will undoubtedly slow down the performance of these systems, but it’s worth noting that most of the processors and GPUs used in China’s leading-edge systems are domestically designed, although they still rely on foreign manufacturers like TSMC or Samsung Electronics for fabrication.
Finally, it’s important to mention that running and reporting performance on the Top500 list is often seen more as a matter of public relations than a general performance benchmark. Historically, Top500 has been valuable in terms of providing a data point in the larger ecosystem of modern HPC performance metrics, as it represents a standardized system benchmark test. It also requires non-trivial time and effort to obtain a good benchmark run. As Dongarra mentioned, they haven’t run (reported) benchmark tests for the new systems yet, but information can be gleaned from research papers and application performance—which is crucial in any case.
It should also be noted that many new large-scale systems aimed at the burgeoning GenAI market have not run (or at least not publicly released) the Top500 HPC benchmark tests. Additionally, there is no requirement for any supercomputing-level system to run HPC benchmark tests and report its performance to the Top500 list. Many private companies and three-letter government entities use powerful machines but have never released any type of benchmark.
Certainly, the threat of further sanctions looms over China’s high-performance computing systems, and maintaining silence about progress might be a way to avoid drawing too much attention. In some ways, Top500 makes system comparisons “too easy.” There are more balanced benchmark tests, such as HPCG, which consists of multiple applications, including the HPL benchmark used for ranking in the top 500.
The rise of Chinese supercomputing capabilities provides strong support for national technological innovation, defense, climate research, and various other critical fields. The high-speed computational capabilities of supercomputers and their ability to tackle complex problems will undoubtedly help China make significant breakthroughs and advancements in numerous domains.
With the emergence of this new supercomputer, China’s influence and standing in the world of supercomputing will further solidify. China’s supercomputing prowess not only has a significant impact on the nation’s scientific research but also showcases the country’s robust capabilities and ambitions in technological innovation to the global community.
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