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The Tianhe-2 Supercomputer: Less than Meets the Eye?
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Tsay, Brian |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | SITC Bulletin Analysis July 2013 The Tianhe-2 Supercomputer: Less than Meets the Eye? Brian TSAY Graduate Researcher UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation The Chinese Tianhe-2 (TH-2; 天河二号) is now the fastest supercomputer in the world. Manufactured by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and the Chinese company Inspur (浪潮), its peak perfor- mance—and power consumption—are roughly double that of the next fastest supercomputer, the Cray XK7 Titan located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Titan, the world’s former number one supercomputer, has a peak performance of 17.59 petaflops; the TH-2 has a peak performance of 33.86 PFlops. 1 While the TH-2 represents a significant achievement for the Chinese in the race towards exascale computing and the second time a Chinese supercomputer has achieved top ranking, there appears to be less progress in the drive towards indigenous Chinese innovation. Like China’s previous supercomputers, the TH-2 continues to rely on foreign sources for critical com- ponents—namely the processors—and the development of Chinese software applications for supercomputers con- tinues to lag behind the notable advances in hardware, limiting the practical uses for supercomputers in China. Supercomputers, often referred to as high-performance computers (HPC), offer far greater performance than typi- cal mainstream computer systems and are used to tackle larger problems and to solve them in a shorter amount of time. 2 Usually, these problems are derived from complex mathematical models of the physical world, simulated from physical systems that are often too complex to analyze through observations or theory. Complex systems and models also tend to generate large amounts of data; supercomputers allow the end user to process these data much more rapidly than mainstream computers. In addition, supercomputer modeling can be used to replace experiments that would be infeasible or just impossible to run. Supercomputers are used in a broad array of scientific fields, in- cluding atmospheric sciences, astrophysics, chemical separations, and evolutionary biology, to name a few. 3 Supercomputing applications can also have implications for national security. In the United States, simulations run on supercomputers are now used in lieu of actual nuclear weapons testing. Accurate supercomputer models are required to evaluate the potential performance of explosives used in nuclear weapons. They are also used to assess the state of America’s nuclear stockpile and to predict the effect of aging on weapons components. The ability of 1 One petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second. A floating-point operation is any mathematical operation or assignment that involves floating-point numbers, which have decimal points in them, as opposed to binary integer options. The TH-2 is therefore capable of performing roughly 34 quadrillion of these operations in one second. Performance data for the TH-2 from “Top500 List - June 2013,” http://www.top500.org/list/2013/06/. 2 The terms “HPC” and “supercomputing” will be used interchangeably throughout this article. 3 Susan L. Graham, Marc Snir, and Cynthia A. Patterson, eds., Getting Up to Speed: The Future of Supercomputing (National Acad- emies Press, 2004), http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11148; The Potential Impact of High-End Capability Computing on Four Illustrative Fields of Science and Engineering (National Academies Press, 2008), http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12451. This material is based upon work supported by, or in part by, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office through the Minerva Initiative under grant #W911NF-09-1-0081. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Army Research Office. SITC Study of Innovation and Technology in China Study of Innovation and Technology in China AN IGCC PROJECT |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt1839q9q8/qt1839q9q8.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://igcc.ucsd.edu/assets/001/504798.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
