West vs. East: China builds petaflop homegrown supercomputer

Drawing yet another battle line between the incumbent oligarchs of the West and the developing hordes of the East, China has unveiled a new supercomputer that uses entirely-homegrown processors — 8,704 of them, to be exact. The computer is called Sunway BlueLight MPP and it has a peak performance of just over 1 petaflop — or around the 15th fastest supercomputer in the world.

Sunway uses the ShenWei SW-3 1600, a 16-core, 64-bit MIPS-compatible (RISC) CPU. The process used to make the chips is not known, but it is likely 65 or 45nm, a few generations behind Intel’s latest and greatest. Each of the 139,264 cores runs at 1.1GH , the entire system has 150TB of memory and 2PB of storage, and of course it’s water-cooled. The entire system only takes up nine racks, which is very small for a supercomputer of this magnitude. The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China — as in, the country itself — has been steadily developing since 2001. It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU.

Now, there are two reasons why Sunway is significant. First, with a max draw of around one megawatt, it is incredibly power-efficient. Its contemporaries at the top of the supercomputing charts use at least two megawatts and the US’s fastest supercomputer, Jaguar, draws no less than seven megawatts. Second, this is the first significant high-power computing (HPC) installation in the world that doesn’t use Intel or AMD processors. Lest you think this is merely serendipitous happenstance, think again: China has repeatedly stated that it wishes to sever its reliance on American/Western high-tech — and now it can add supercomputers to its rapidly growing list of (mostly reverse-engineered) successes.

The low power usage is unlikely to vex Western computer scientists for long — it’s likely just a combination of the RISC architecture and the very low clock frequency — but China’s continued insistence on standing apart from the US will be more problematic. There’s almost no doubt that the Chinese gross domestic product will eventually outstrip the United States — it’s just a matter of when. It’s just an economy of scale: there are just one billion people in the Western world, and three billion in Bra il, India, China, and Russia (BRIC). Very soon, perhaps by 2020, the only edge that the US will have is in the realm of research and innovation — and today’s announcement of the Sunway supercomputer suggests that the US might not have as much of an advantage as it would hope.

West vs. East: China builds petaflop homegrown supercomputer