A new Chinese computer system that can make 93 quadrillions calculations per second has claimed the top spot on the list of the world's most powerful super computers.
The computer called Sunway Taihu Light developed by the National Research Centre of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC) is built entirely using processors designed and made in China. The super computer installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in China displaced Tianhe-2, an Intel-based Chinese supercomputer that has claimed the top 1 spot on the past six TOP500 lists. The closely watched list is issued twice a year Sunway TaihuLight is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2, which posted a performance of 33.86 quadrillions of calculations per second.
Overview
The Sunway TaihuLight System was developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC), and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (a joint team with the Tsinghua University, City of Wuxi, and Jiangsu province), which is in China's Jiangsu province. The CPU vendor is the Shanghai High Performance IC Design Center. The system is in full operation with a number of applications implemented and running on the system. The Center will be a public supercomputing center that provides services for public users in China and across the world. The complete system has a theoretical peak performance of 125.4 Pflop/s with 10,649,600 cores and 1.31 PB of primary memory. It is based on a processor, the SW26010 processor, that was designed by the Shanghai High Performance IC Design Center. The processor chip is composed of 4 core groups (CGs), see figure 1, connected via a NoC, see figure 2, each of which includes a Management Processing Element (MPE) and 64 Computing Processing Elements (CPEs) arranged in an 8 by 8 grid. Each CG has its own memory space, which is connected to the MPE and the CPE cluster through the MC. The processor connects to other outside devices through a system interface (SI).
Each CPE Cluster is composed of a Management Processing Element (MPE) which is a 64-bit RISC core which is supporting both user and system modes, a 256-bit vector instructions, 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache, and a 256KB L2 cache. The Computer Processing Element (CPE) is composed of an 8x8 mesh of 64-bit RISC cores, supporting only user mode, with a 256-bit vector instructions, 16 KB L1 instruction cache and 64 KB Scratch Pad Memory (SPM).
The SW26010 chip is a Chinese “homegrown” many-core processor. The Vendor is the Shanghai High Performance IC Design Center which was supported by National Science and Technology Major Project (NMP): Core Electronic Devices, High-end Generic Chips, and Basic Software.
Titan a Cray X40 system installed at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is now at the third position, with 17.59 quadrillions of calculations per second Sequoia an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Fujitsu's K computer installed at the RIKEN Institute for Advanced Computational Science (AICS) in Japan are at the fourth and fifth positions respectively.
Other systems in the top ten include a BlueGene/Q system called Mira in the US, a Cray X40 system known as Trinity, and the most powerful system in European Cray XC30 system called Piz Daint at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Hazel Hen installed at HLRS in Germany and Shaheen II in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, both Cray XC4 systems, are at the ninth and tenth positions.
Power Efficiency
The peak power consumption under load (running the HPL benchmark) is at 15.371 MW or 6 Gflops/W. This is just for the processor, memory, and interconnect network. The cooling system used is a closed-coupled chilled water cooling with a customized liquid water-cooling unit.
The Power System
The power system is made up of a mutual-backup power input of 2x35 KV which go to a Frontend power supply with output of DC 300V. The Cabinet power supply is DC 12V and the CPU power supply is DC 0.9V.
The Interconnect
Sunway has built their own interconnect. There is a five-level integrated hierarchy, connecting the computing node, computing board, super-nodes, cabinet, to the complete system. Each card Each board has four cards, one facing up and one facing down, so each board has 8 nodes
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