HOW CHINA MAY SPUR THE U.S. SUPERCOMPUTING DOMINANCE
[PHOTO AT LEFT - China's supercomputer will be 1.4 times faster than the current quickest, in a laboratory in Tennessee]
NEW ORLEANS, NOVEMBER 12, 2010 (ComputerWorld) By Patrick Thibodeau - U.S. supercomputing dominance is being challenged in ways it has not seen before, and that may be the best thing to ever happen to this field, particularly in Washington's climate of cost cutting.
Of the top four supercomputer systems on the semi-annual Top 500 list released this week, two are in China, the top-ranked Tianhe-1A at 2.5 petaflops and in the third spot, its Nebulae system. Japan has the fourth-largest system. The U.S. is in second place with the Cray XT5 Jaguar system at 1.75 petaflops. The announcement came as experts in supercomputing were gathering in New Orleans for the SC10 conference.
Addison Snell, CEO of InterSect360, a high-performance computing research group, said Asia's showing in supercomputers will get the attention of political leaders.
"When it's all over the popular press that three of the top four supercomputers in the world, according to how they measure it, are in Asia, there is no way there is not a response in Congress to that," Snell said.
Earl Joseph, a high-performance computing analyst at IDC, said "global competitiveness" will drive HPC but it isn't about building the most powerful system in the world.
"The Chinese are not doing the old traditional supercomputing war," Joseph said. Instead, China's government is building 14 different petascale computing centers "because they recognize the competitive value of that."
Even Russia has realized that its products won't be as competitive without high performance computing, Joseph said, a reference to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's scalding criticism last year of his country's progress in supercomputing.
"I don't know what the budget situation will turn out to be in Congress," said Andy Keane, the general manager of Tesla business at Nvidia Corp., but supercomputing technology "is directly related to the progress we make on the economy."
Supercomputing allows research to simulate environments, and the more powerful the computer, the larger and more detailed the simulation, such as the working of a human cell at the atomic level. Supercomputers can also help manufacturers speed product development by allowing engineers to design, change and test products in virtual environments before producing physical prototypes. The largest systems are typically built by governments.
Nvidia is being helped by the U.S. government on high-performance computing through a research contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Keane said.
DARPA, in a request for proposals from vendors earlier this year, said that current processing systems are "grossly power-inefficient" and that technology trends "have reached a performance wall."
One of the means for solving this has been to turn to GPUs, which are roughly about 10 times more efficient than CPUs, said Keane. The DARPA contract is helping Nvidia to devote more research on the problems, he said.
Keane said it is possible to improve GPU efficiency by "another factor of about 100," to enable to work at exascale, a system that is roughly 1,000 times more powerful than a petaflop system.
"The computer that will be the fastest will be the computer that has the lowest energy per operation," he said.
Keane said the goal of an exascale system will be achieved by 2018, if not before, and he predicted by 2014-2015 there will be systems that are a third to halfway there, meaning in the range of 500 petaflops.
Nivida's GPU technology was used by China and Japan in building their top-ranked systems. The U.S. system, Jaguar, built entirely of CPUs, uses about 7 megawatts versus the GPU using the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at about 4 megawatts.
Systems that incorporate accelerator technology are spreading rapidly. SGI this week announced a new system that was built from the ground up with "optimized accelerator architecture," according to Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing at SGI.
Mannel said the approach used to build this system, along with its relatively small size, puts it in range of an exaflop.
The SGI Prism XL, code-named Mojo, can deliver approximately one petaflop from a cabinet that is about the size of three standard 19" racks. It can support accelerator cards from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Tilera. The price range isn't being disclosed.
Despite the change in the top supercomputing rankings, the U.S. maintains a sizable lead in supercomputing. Of the 500 top supercomputers in the world, 274 are in the U.S.
Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.
BUT.........
Next Wave of Supercomputers Due in 2012 By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld Nov 14, 2010 9:24 am
The U.S. is building two 20-petaflop supercomputers (photo), many times more powerful than anything operating today, including China's new supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A , which is expected to be officially crowned next week as the world's fastest system.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home for what has been the world's most powerful system, the Jaguar, a 1.75-petaflop system , versus Tianhe-1A's 2.5 petaflops, is building a 20-petaflop system that will include accelerators.
That system will be ready in 2012, James Hack, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge, told Computerworld. No other details about the system are being offered.
Another 20- petaflop system is being built for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by IBM . That system has already been announced and is expected to arrive at the lab in late 2011 and be in production in 2012.
The earliest it is likely to be ready for consideration in the Top500 Supercomputer Sites list will be for the June 2012 release of the ranking, said Don Johnston, a spokesman for Lawrence Livermore labs.
Whether these 20-petaflop systems emerge as the top systems in the world remains to be seen, but with China also racing ahead in building its own systems, supercomputing is becoming intensely globally competitive.
"Personally I love it," Jeremy Smith, director of director of the Center for Molecular Biophysics at Oak Ridge, said of the international attention now being paid to supercomputing. "In competing with other countries everybody gains and wins - that's why I'm excited about it."
The global attention may raise the profile of supercomputing and help keep government interest in funding it. When Japan's Earth Simulator emerged as the world's fastest computer in 2002, it "shocked the supercomputing world," Smith said.
The National Research Council, in a report soon after the Japan achieved the top ranking, said that Japan's system "has served as a wake-up call, reminding us that complacency can cause us to lose not only our competitive advantage but also, and more importantly, the national competence that we need to achieve our own goals."
But the Japanese system was a one-time occurrence. China, in contrast, has embarked on a sustained drive to not only build world leading systems, but its own processors and interconnecting technologies for high-performance systems as well.
Japan is still building supercomputers, but its major disclosed project is a 10-petaflop system, nicknamed the "K computer." It's being developed by Fujitsu for use by High-Performance Computing Infrastructure Initiative by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and is due in 2012.
This international push in supercomputing also coming at a point when as a global effort mounts to develop new architectures and programming models to support exascale systems, which are 1,000 times more powerful than a petascale system.
Exascale may offer enormous leaps in scientific research, Smith said. A petascale system can model several million atoms and how they behave, but with an exascale system "you could simulate a whole living cell at atomic detail," Smith said. "Every atom would be explicitly represented."
"If we scale up what we are doing today by a factor of 1,000 that's roughly where we would be -- that's pretty amazing," Smith said.
Exascale will have "tremendous implications for human health, biology and many other fields, too," he said.
Along with the technical challenges of building an exascale system will be the need to develop the science, such as a static model of the cell, that serves as the starting point of a simulation.
The expectation, based on development of processor technology, is that the first exascale system may arrive around 2018.
THE AUTHOR: Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com .
AND SO...
China and US Battle for Supercomputer Bragging Rights Business Center November 15, 2010 12:54 pm By Tony Bradley, PCWorld Practical IT insight from Tony Bradley from Net Work
[PHOTO AT LEFT COURTESY OF THE The Huffington Post - China's Tianhe-1A Now World's FASTEST Supercomputer, Trumps U.S. Machine. The New York Times writes, "The computer, known as Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, which is at a national laboratory in Tennessee, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings." Dongarra also told the New York Times that China's Tianhe-1A "blows away the existing No. 1 machine." NVIDIA noted in a press released that the Tianhe-1A is not only fast, but due to its reliance on GPUs as well as CPUs, it is also "3 times more power efficient -- the difference in power consumption is enough to provide electricity to over 5000 homes for a year." The machine was developed by China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), which describes itself as "under the dual supervision of the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Education."]
China has usurped the supercomputer crown from the United States. It may seem like just a day in the life--just another former glory of the United States falling to a rival nation. But, in the post-Cold War, Internet-era, this particular claim to fame comes with crucial bragging rights that can define the nation.
During the Cold War, the worth and power of the United States and the Soviet Union were measured based on their respective stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Actually launching a nuclear attack and annihilating the planet was obviously out of the question, but essentially the country with the most potential to obliterate the planet was the de facto winner of the pointless stalemate.
Like immature frat boys in a pissing contest, the two nations worked vigorously to best each other in all aspects of the space race and military prowess. Which nation could get into space first? Which could land on the moon first? Which nation had the fastest fighter jet in the world? The list goes on.
The supercomputer has emerged as the new measure of national testosterone in the post-Cold War era. The United States held the top spot with the Cray XT5 "Jaguar" at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee. That supercomputer is capable of 1.75 petaflops per second performance.
China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer, located in Tianjin at the National Supercomputer Center, is the new leader, though, with performance measured at 2.57 petaflops per second. The Chinese supercomputer is nearly 50 percent faster than the Cray, and another Chinese supercomputer--the Nebulae--holds the number three spot.
The United States still owns 275 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, but that number has dwindled slightly--falling from 282 just since June of this year. The United States is not sitting idly by and watching its dominance of the supercomputer arms race trickle away, though.
In fact, the United States isn't just planning on retaking the supercomputer crown from China with some meager 50 percent gain in performance. The United States is developing two supercomputer systems reported to be theoretically capable of 20 petflop performance. That is an increase in performance almost 1000 times greater than the Chinese Tianhe-1A.
Supercomputers are capable of modeling and calculating beyond human comprehension, and could one day unlock many of the mysteries of life and the universe around us. That said, the battle between nations is more about a digital Cold War between rival nations and the bragging rights of being the best just for the sake of being the best.
Read more about Mainframes and Supercomputers in Computerworld's Mainframes and Supercomputers Topic Center.
Chief News Editor: Sol Jose Vanzi
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