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Stephen Chen

The Chinese supercomputer that this week was ranked as the world’s fastest excels at handling dedicated tasks, according to its developer, but analysts say ­software support and multi-tasking are among its weaknesses.
The Sunway TaihuLight topped the TOP500, a twice-yearly ­ranking of supercomputers, on Monday.
TahuLight is a giant and it will do what a giant does best – solving big problems. It is not a paper tiger
A senior scientist working on TaihuLight
The win was China’s seventh in a row, but its first with a ­machine that uses only domestically-made processors.
Its peak calculation performance was 93 petaflops – or a quadrillion ­calculations per second – outpacing the previous winner, the ­Tianhe-2, by a factor of three, when measured on a benchmark known as Linpack.
China tops global supercomputer speed list for seventh year
Peak performance is ­measured while the computer is focused on a single task and ­running at full capacity.
But in real world conditions, a supercomputer must usually ­accomplish a number of tasks ­simultaneously.
When running at full capacity, the central processing unit is serving different clients with different calculation needs.
For these tasks, when measured by a benchmark known as High Performance Conjugate Gradients, the TaihuLight was eclipsed by the Tianhe-2, said Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of ­Tennessee and the Oak Ridge ­National Laboratory in the United States.
On this benchmark, Tianhe-2 reached nearly 0.6 petaflops, but TaihuLight reached less than 0.4 petaflops.

“So for many ‘real’ applications the performance on the TaihuLight will be nowhere near the peak performance rate,” Dongarra said in a research paper.
But a senior scientist involved in the development of TaihuLight, which is run from the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, told the South China Morning Post the machine was not built to carry out the “ordinary small tasks” measured by the gradient benchmark.
“We will only work with clients with big projects, who need a really powerful machine to complete a single task in a relatively short period of time,” said the scientist, who declined to be named. He said the approach was opposite to the one taken by the team behind Tianhe-2.
“They built an enormous machine and then broke it down into fragments to serve the needs of many small clients,” the scientist said, adding such tasks could be better accomplished by small servers in a cloud. “TaihuLight is a giant and it will do what a giant does best – solving big problems. It is not a paper tiger.”

The TaihuLight was developed to solve problems in ­engineering and research, including climate, advanced manufacturing and data analytics.
Some projects might involve data ­covering the evolutionary history of the universe, decoding the human genome, and developing next-generation spacecraft.
The ShenWei chips’ performance comes out neck-and-neck with the Intel chips, according to our observation
Wang Lanning, of Beijing Normal University
Aside from its real world ­applications, the TaihuLight is a landmark in terms of its ­components, using home-made 260-core ShenWei chips, whereas the Tianhe-2 was built using Intel processors. Beijing views the ­development of the ShenWei chips as vital given the export ­embargo the US has slapped on highly advanced chips that could have military applications.
But according to Dongarra, the architecture of the ShenWei chip is to blame for the TaihuLight’s weaker multi-tasking ­performance.

Professor Sun Gongxing, who has developed high-performance computers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, said most scientific research software could not run on the TaihuLight because of the system’s chips.
Chinese supercomputer 'too slow' to compete in race for hypersonic weapons, scientist warns
“Most software on the market is written for the Intel CPU, which can deal with many different tasks. The ShenWei chip has a simpler structure than the Intel CPU, so it is more energy efficient. But the downside is it can only deal with a smaller range of tasks, which may limit the scope of its applications,” Sun said.
“To fully exploit the potential of TaihuLight, hundreds of developers will need to be hired to write programs for a calculation task. It will cost a lot of money,” he said.
The ShenWei chips’ performance comes out neck-and-neck with the Intel chips, according to our observation
Wang Lanning, of Beijing Normal University
Wang Lanning, a professor of meteorology at Beijing Normal University, who conducted a complex planetary-scale cloud simulation using TaihuLight, said the ShenWei was on par with its overseas competitors.
“We have run the same tasks on the TaihuLight and other supercomputers,” he said. “The ShenWei chips’ performance comes out neck and neck with the Intel chips.”


World’s fastest computer solves big problems, doing a quadrillion calculations per second, but hates multi-tasking

The Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest supercomputer, can carry out a quadrillion calculations per second. Photo: Xinhua

(160620) -- WUXI, June 20, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Photo taken on June 20, 2016 shows the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, east China's Jiangsu Province. China's new supercomputing system, Sunway-TaihuLight, was named the world's fastest computer at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany on Monday. The National Supercomputing Center was also unveiled Monday in Wuxi, where the new-generation supercomputer is installed. (Xinhua/Li Xiang)(mcg)

(160620) -- WUXI, June 20, 2016 (Xinhua) -- An engineer shows the many-core processor of Sunway TaihuLight, a new Chinese supercomputer, in Wuxi, east China's Jiangsu Province, June 16, 2016. Performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second, Sunway TaihuLight dethroned China's Tianhe-2 from the top in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.  Sunway TaihuLight, with 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes, is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2, which has a performance of 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second, or petaflop/s. The new system was developed by the Chinese National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. (Xinhua/Li Xiang) (lfj)

(160620) -- WUXI, June 20, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Photo taken on June 16, 2016 shows interchanger cables of Sunway TaihuLight, a new Chinese supercomputer, in Wuxi, east China's Jiangsu Province. Performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second, Sunway TaihuLight dethroned China's Tianhe-2 from the top in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.  Sunway TaihuLight, with 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes, is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2, which has a performance of 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second, or petaflop/s. The new system was developed by the Chinese National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. (Xinhua/Li Xiang) (lfj)

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The Sunway TaihuLight can be used to decode human genome secrets, predict the impact of climate change or build next-generation spacecraft, says analyst
