The Supercomputer news!
Chinese had the spotlight in the international establishment last year were they displayed the fastest computer on the planet, besting its closest american competitor by the number-crunching equivalent of a county mile.
After that last week in a conference at Jinan, China unveiled the "Sunway Bluelight MPP" supercomputer that does not use the microprocessor designed either by INTEL or AMD. This latest super computer uses a new processor that was designed and manufactured by the Chinese themselves! The ShenWei processor was designed at a supercomputing institute in china and manufactured in Shanghai, and it uses a new instruction set. Not the venerable x86 instruction set used by INTEL and AMD. This is a kind of shifting the bragging rights in the worldwide super computing. This also shows the amount of effort that china puts in building the multicore processors that can be put into the world's fastest computer.
Before the Sunway was uncloaked, Dongarra was expecting China to reveal a computing cluster based on an eight-core chip its engineers were developing under the “Loongson” or “Godson” name. Instead, the Sunway uses a previously unknown chip dubbed the “ShenWei SW-3.” Harnessing 8,700 of these chips, the cluster can, in theory, handle more than 1,000 trillion calculations a second — aka a petaflop.
That will likely put the Sunway among the top 20 fastest supercomputers when Dongarra and crew unveil their official list next month. For the University of Tennessee computer scientist, this shows that China is gaining ground on the big American chip-makers faster than expected. “China hasn’t done much in the way of microprocessor development over the past 20 years,” he says. “But it won’t take them 20 years to catch up. It’s going to take them a very short time.”But when the leader of microprocessors manufacturers where are asked comments on this, there was no response. Dr. David K. Kahaner, the president and founding director of the Asian Technology Information Program, told that the Chinese briefed him on the Sunway in April and that they claimed it would it would achieve 75% efficiency on the Linpack benchmark.
In the last fall, another chinese operation unveiled the tianhe-1A, based on the INTEL's Xeon processors, which was then the fastest computing machine. It was soon topped by K computer by the Japanese. and the Japanese will likely hold their crown when the list of Top 500 supercomputers is officially revealed. But in many ways, the Sunway had already stolen the thunder.