What happened to "Shenwei" three consecutive world supercomputing championships?

On June 19, the Global Supercomputing Conference held in Frankfurt, Germany announced the new list of the top 500 global supercomputers. The "Sunway" developed by the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center using China's independent chips "TaihuLight" appears at the top of the Global Supercomputer 500 list (49th issue) for the third time, achieving three consecutive titles.

At the same time, two application results of "Sunway TaihuLight" have also been nominated for the "Gordon Bell Award".

One minute’s computing power is equivalent to 7.2 billion people using calculators to calculate continuously for 32 years at the same time

Walking into the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center, in a 1,000-square-meter room, the reporter saw The "real body" of "Sunway TaihuLight": consists of 40 computing cabinets and 8 network cabinets. Each computing cabinet is slightly larger than a household double-door refrigerator. When the cabinet door is opened, four groups of super nodes composed of 32 computing plug-ins are distributed inside. According to the staff, each plug-in consists of four computing node boards, and one computing node board contains two "Sunway 26010" high-performance processors. One cabinet has 1,024 processors, and the entire "Sunway TaihuLight" has 40,960 processors.

So, how powerful is "Shenwei Taihu Light"? According to reports, its system’s peak performance is 1.25 billion operations per second, sustained performance is 930 million operations per second, and performance-power consumption ratio is 6.05 billion operations per watt, ranking first in the world.

Just looking at the data is not straightforward. Yang Guangwen, director of the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, said, “To put it simply, the computing power of this system for one minute is equivalent to 7.2 billion people around the world using calculators to calculate 32 times continuously at the same time. year; if mainstream laptops or personal desktops produced in 2016 are used as a reference, 'Sunway Taihu Light' is equivalent to more than 2 million ordinary computers."

Yang Guangwen introduced, "Sunway Taihu Light. "Light" is the world's first epoch-making new supercomputer with a peak computing speed of more than 1 billion times and a parallel scale of more than 10 million cores. The whole machine adopts high-density computing super nodes and high-traffic scalable composite network architecture to achieve efficient scalability and parallel operation of the whole system; it adopts a hierarchical inclusive and hierarchical autonomy software and hardware collaborative fault-tolerant system to achieve high availability of the whole machine system; through oriented Compilation optimization of typical applications and machine structures, adaptive fine balance scheduling and other technologies enable efficient operation of application software.

For the first time, the "Chinese core" is fully used, integrating the computing control core and the computing core

What makes Yang Guangwen even more proud is that the central processing unit used in this world's number one supercomputer , is a domestically designed and produced domestic chip - "Shenwei 26010" many-core processor.

Zhang Yunquan, a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an expert in parallel computing, said that "Sunway TaihuLight" is the first time China's most powerful supercomputer is completely manufactured with "Chinese cores." When it won the championship for the first time, the International TOP500 organization commented on "Sunway Taihu Light" like this: "China maintains its first position on the 47th issue of the International TOP500 organization's list by virtue of a completely based A new system built with a processor designed and manufactured in China.”

Yang Guangwen introduced that this is a unique processor that uses an on-chip fusion heterogeneous many-core architecture and has Instruction set with independent intellectual property rights and complete supporting software ecosystem. This unique architecture integrates 260 computing cores and billions of transistors in an area of ??25 square centimeters, achieving a computing power of 3 trillion times per second.

Why does this chip have such powerful performance? Yang Guangwen said that specifically, graphics processing and other chips used to be in the form of plug-in cards. Such chip design would cause several problems: First, the assembly scale is large and consumes electricity. Second, PCE serves as a communication interface, causing a bottleneck. This chip integrates the computing control core and the computing core into one chip, thus solving both problems. "Internationally, Intel may be launching similar chips now, and we are ahead of the curve."

In addition to chips, as a supercomputing system, "Sunway TaihuLight" has great advantages in architecture, high-speed Key technologies such as the Internet and system software have achieved unprecedented innovations and breakthroughs, bringing about leaps and bounds in performance. Yang Guangwen said that through years of accumulation, they have built a relatively complete software ecological chain from compiler, operating system, development environment to application platform, and have optimized the performance of hardware to ensure performance and energy-saving utilization. .

It has accumulated hundreds of application topics, serving weather, climate, aerospace and other fields

Two application results were shortlisted for the 2017 "Gordon Bell Award" nomination in 2016 One of the application results has won an award, filling the gap in my country's "Nobel Prize" in this field of high-performance computing applications. The progress of "Sunway TaihuLight" in application is unexpected.

According to Yang Guangwen, according to current statistics, the utilization rate of "Sunway·TaihuLight" in the past year has exceeded 50%, and it has accumulated hundreds of application projects. There are currently some major projects under "Sunway·Light of Taihu". Full-machine debugging is being carried out on the TaihuLight, such as the 2016 Gordon Bell Award-winning application "Global Atmospheric Non-static Cloud Resolution Simulation", and some applications are currently being carried out on a small scale on the "Sunway TaihuLight". Debugging at scale while queuing up schedules for larger-scale applications. Currently, many national professional institutions and research institutes, including the National Meteorological Administration, are conducting applied research on "Sunway TaihuLight" and are further seeking comprehensive cooperation with the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center. “Therefore, we are not worried at all about the dissatisfaction of ‘Sunway Taihu Light’.” Yang Guangwen said that the core issue at present is how to make good use of it, so as to produce more important results. In addition, it is necessary to consider how to cultivate more industrial users who are willing to cooperate long-term and have strong demand while having a large number of scientific research users.

Fu Haohuan, deputy director of the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center and associate professor of Tsinghua University, said that supercomputing is the earliest and most widely used in the fields of science and engineering, with the most significant application effects. It has become one of the most important scientific and technological fields along with theoretical research and scientific experiments. The three major scientific methods used by humans to explore the unknown world are called the third pillar supporting scientific discovery. "Sunway Taihu Light" plays a very important role in my country's scientific and technological innovation and economic development. At present, the application fields involve 19 aspects such as weather and climate, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, and new materials. It supports hundreds of solving tasks in the fields of major national science and technology applications, advanced manufacturing, etc., and has completed more than 2 million tasks in total in a year. On average, nearly 7,000 tasks are completed every day. According to Fu Haohuan, "Sunway Taihu Light" has been applied in research fields that represent the future development direction of "black technology", such as "artificial small sun", which is the theoretical and experimental simulation of nuclear fusion power generation.

The reporter saw in the application results display area of ??the National Supercomputer Wuxi Center that China’s aviation and aerospace-related research institutions are currently cooperating with Wuxi Supercomputing to simulate various flight states of the C919 large aircraft, as well as the Tiangong Simulation of the flight status of a series of spacecraft. A company in Shandong is also using the super power of "Sunway Taihu Light" to produce animations. According to reports, this can not only produce more realistic animation rendering effects, but also greatly shorten the production cycle. "In the future, it is very likely that we will see domestic animation blockbusters produced based on the computing power of 'Sunway TaihuLight'." Yang Guangwen said.

In addition, the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center is also considering how to serve local economic development. "Jiangsu is a major manufacturing province. How to help the manufacturing industry achieve innovation is an important application direction we are considering." Yang Guangwen said that the center hopes to better support the development of the local manufacturing industry and build the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center in Jiangsu An industrial science and technology innovation center in the province. He said that at present, most application software in China's manufacturing industry is commercial software from abroad. In this regard, the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center is also making arrangements. For example, it has started the construction of the Greenwich Smart Wind Farm Platform with Envision Energy. Conduct research in automobile manufacturing, shipbuilding, new drug research and development, etc.

China is mighty!

The development of science and technology has allowed the motherland to develop rapidly!