Tuesday, September 19, 2017

"China Upgrading Milky Way 2 Supercomputer to 95 Petaflops"

It was just six days ago we posted "The Astonishing Engineering Behind America's Latest, Greatest Supercomputer" and bitched at the source of the headline and story, Wired:
What's truly astonishing is that:
a) Wired does not mention the graphics processing units are from NVIDIA
b) the Chinese may have taken an insurmountable lead in the need-for-speed derby and the ORNL computer, designed to be the world's fastest may not make it.
The folks at Wired are smart and have been on the tech beat for a long time, they should know better than to do puff pieces.  
If interested in this stuff, whether for modeling complex-chaotic systems such as markets or weather or for national security applications or just because supercomputers are amazing in their own right see also:...
I apparently was crabby that day.
I'll repost the ten fastest 'puters from the Top500 list after the jump so you can see what a lead China is building at the pinnacle of the computer-makers art.
 
From Inside HPC [high performance computing]:
We have some breaking news from the IHPC Forum in Guangzhou today. Researchers in China are busy upgrading the MilkyWay 2 (Tianhe-2) system to nearly 95 Petaflops (peak). This should nearly double the performance of the system, which is currently ranked at #2 on TOP500 with 33.86 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark. The upgraded system, dubbed Tianhe -2A, should be completed in the coming months.
 
Details about the system upgrade were presented at the conference opening session. While the current system derives much of its performance from Intel Knights Corner co-processors, the new system swaps these PCI devices out for custom-made 4-way MATRIX-200o boards, with each chip providing 2.46 Teraflops of peak performance.
 
According to tweets posted by Satoshi Matsuoka, the upgraded system is impressive in that it is only 2+years in making design-to-board, wit/80,000 chips for the upgrade....MORE
A bit over a year ago we were impressed that China had built the world's fastest machine, still ranked #1, with all-Chinese tech:
June 2016
China has had the world's fastest computer for the last three years or so, the Tianhe-2, which used Intel microprocessors so this latest computer is a remarkable achievement. The U.S. plans to recapture the top spot for the first time in five years years when Oak Ridge builds their latest machine using IBM CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA's NV Link tying it all together. The ORNL 'puter should hit either the Nov. 2017 or June 2018 Top 500 lists....
 (Milky Way 2 uses Intel) but now #2 is about to become #1 and I am out of superlatives.

Rank System Cores Rmax (TFlop/s) Rpeak (TFlop/s) Power (kW)
1 Sunway TaihuLight - Sunway MPP, Sunway SW26010 260C 1.45GHz, Sunway , NRCPC
National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi
China
10,649,600 93,014.6 125,435.9 15,371
2 Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P , NUDT
National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou
China
3,120,000 33,862.7 54,902.4 17,808
3 Piz Daint - Cray XC50, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA Tesla P100 , Cray Inc.
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)
Switzerland
361,760 19,590.0 25,326.3 2,272
4 Titan - Cray XK7, Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x , Cray Inc.
DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
United States
560,640 17,590.0 27,112.5 8,209
5 Sequoia - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom , IBM
DOE/NNSA/LLNL
United States
1,572,864 17,173.2 20,132.7 7,890
6 Cori - Cray XC40, Intel Xeon Phi 7250 68C 1.4GHz, Aries interconnect , Cray Inc.
DOE/SC/LBNL/NERSC
United States
622,336 14,014.7 27,880.7 3,939
7 Oakforest-PACS - PRIMERGY CX1640 M1, Intel Xeon Phi 7250 68C 1.4GHz, Intel Omni-Path , Fujitsu
Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing
Japan
556,104 13,554.6 24,913.5 2,719
8 K computer, SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect , Fujitsu
RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS)
Japan
705,024 10,510.0 11,280.4 12,660
9 Mira - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom , IBM
DOE/SC/Argonne National Laboratory
United States
786,432 8,586.6 10,066.3 3,945
10 Trinity - Cray XC40, Xeon E5-2698v3 16C 2.3GHz, Aries interconnect , Cray Inc.
DOE/NNSA/LANL/SNL
United States
301,056 8,100.9 11,078.9 4,233