China wants place on supercomputer charts
Published: 25 Jul 2003 09:31 BST
China plans to create the world's third most powerful supercomputer, which will also be among the first such machines to use the Opteron processor from US chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
According to the official People's Daily, Chinese supercomputer-maker Dawning Information Industry will use 2,000 of these chips to make the Dawning 4000A, with help from AMD.
The 4000A will be a cluster comprised of computers running a Chinese-designed Linux operating system and mainboard chips, said the report, and will aim to hit 10 teraflops in computing power.
According to the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, top place is held by the NEC Earth Simulator in Japan, with a 36 teraflop rating. This machine uses 5,120 vector processors, special chips that execute computational operations at high speed with a single instruction.
Second and third place are occupied by two identical HP systems called ASCI Q at Los Alamos National Laboratory that now have been combined into one with a 14 teraflop speed. The system uses 8,192 Alpha processors.
When the 4000A is ready for delivery next June -- and assuming the Top500 list remains unchanged -- it will knock the third-place 2,304 processor Linux NetWorx cluster at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory off its perch. Satisfyingly for AMD, this 8 teraflop computer is the fastest in the list with processors from rival chipmaker Intel.
The highest ranking so far for a Chinese company on the chart was 43, achieved by the Legend Group last year, the report observed.
The race to make powerful computers is a matter of national pride for China, and the country ranks the activity with space exploration and genetic research as a key indicator of national progress. Thanks to the open-source Linux operating system and clustering technology which allows smaller, less complex machines to be yoked into one computing unit, the job of building supercomputers has been made much simpler.
The announcement of the 4000A sheds light on an AMD press release accidentally leaked in late June, which mentioned a collaboration with a Chinese firm to build a supercomputer using AMD's new 64-bit Opteron processor. The recently-launched Opteron is aimed at corporate server computers and competes with Intel's Itanium 2.
AMD has yet to make an official announcement on the Dawning 4000A, and AMD in Singapore could not give more details at press time.
However, by the time the Chinese machine is launched, it may well have been outclassed by faster Opteron-based supercomputers.
According to information on AMD's Web site, the company is working with US supercomputer maker Cray on a massive 10,000-Opteron unit called Red Storm for the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. When ready next year, its 40 teraflop rating will put the NEC Earth Simulator in the shade.
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