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In
2001, China had no presence on the list of the top 500 supercomputers
in the world. Today, the world's most populous country has the most
supercomputers on the list, including the world's fastest — and for the
first time ever it no longer relies on chips made by U.S. companies.
The
Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer based at the state-funded Chinese
Supercomputing Center in the city of Wuxi, Jiangsu province, a two-hour
drive from Shanghai. China already held the top spot on the list of
fastest supercomputers with the Tianhe-2, but that featured processors
built by Intel, a U.S. company.
However,
a chip built by the Shanghai High Performance IC Design Center
called SW26010 is capable of achieving 125.4 petaflops (Pflop/s).
That means it can carry out more than 125 quintillion calculations per
second. The SW26010 is comprised of more than 10 million processing
cores, and to put its performance in context, Tianhe-2 topped the list
in 2015 with a performance of 33.86 Pflops/s.
“As
the first number one system of China that is completely based on
homegrown processors, the Sunway TaihuLight system demonstrates the
significant progress that China has made in the domain of designing and
manufacturing large-scale computation systems,” Guangwen Yang, director
of the Chinese Supercomputing Center, told TOP500 News.
The
supercomputer will be used for research and engineering work in areas
such as climate, weather and earth systems modeling, life science
research, advanced manufacturing and data analytics.
The
list of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers is compiled by research
organization TOP500, and the list this year shows that for the first
time China has more supercomputers (167) on the list than the U.S.
(165), with Japan a distant third with just 29.
So how has China gone from supercomputer nobody to powerhouse in such a short time?
1. China's Government
China's
government wants to lessen (and where possible eradicate) the
dependence on overseas technology, specifically technology designed and
built in the U.S. To do this, it has invested heavily in research and
development such as the National Supercomputing Center to develop
homegrown solutions.
According
to Wall Street research firm Sanford C. Bernstein, the country buys
half of all the semiconductors produced in the world, but it doesn't
have a single domestic chipmaker among the world's biggest. For this
reason, China's government has told local media that it will pledge 1
trillion yuan ($152 billion) to help create a Chinese chip industry by
2025.
The Sunway TaihuLight is a major milestone on the road to creating this industry.
2. U.S. Embargo
In
addition to being spurred by its own government, the Chinese technology
industry was given a push by the U.S. government, too. In April
2015, the U.S. blocked high-end processors, such as Intel's Xeon Phi
chips, from being sold to a number of Chinese supercomputing centers.
The U.S. Department of Commerce never publicly said why the embargo was
in place, but the rules state certain items can be blocked if there
is "a significant risk of being or becoming involved in activities that
are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the
United States."
The move precipitated a more concerted effort in China to develop and manufacture such chips domestically.
3. Money
While
the market for supercomputing chips is not huge, there is a huge market
for computer chips in general, and by showing that it can produce
processors capable of matching, and beating, those on offer from Intel
and IBM, China is now in a position to begin marketing its homegrown
solutions to server manufacturers and data centers — a market that is
currently dominated by Intel.
Companies
like Intel and Qualcomm know just how important the Chinese market
is and are aware of the risks a well-funded domestic chipmaker could
have on their bottom lines. To that end both companies have invested
heavily in China, partnering with local companies to bring manufacturing
to the country.
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