China keeps lead in number of supercomputers, makes technological breakthroughs

By Ma Jingjing Source:Global Times Published: 2019/11/20 21:22:48

A worker checks the TH-2 High Performance Computer System in a lab in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province. File photo: VCG


The amount of supercomputers installed in China outnumbers that in the US, while the nation's overall performance gap with the US is narrowing amid technological breakthroughs in heat dissipation.

The number of supercomputer installations in China reached 227, up from 219 from six months ago, while that in the US remains near its all-time low at 118, showed the latest Number of TOP500 Supercomputers list released on Monday.

The list is updated every six months.

The top three system manufacturers with regard to the number of installations are Lenovo Group, Dawning Information Industry Co (or Sugon) and Inspur Group, reflecting China's dominance. Lenovo Group has 174, Sugon has 71 and Inspur has 65.

US supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc ranked No.4, with 36 installations, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise came fifth, with 35. Cray Inc is a subsidiary of the latter.

The reason why Lenovo has taken the lead is because of its advanced heat dissipation technology, which can take away 90 percent of heat from the supercomputer, Yuan Lanfeng, a research fellow at the University of Science and Technology of China, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

"Large-scale application of artificial intelligence demands higher performance by supercomputers, which markedly drives an increase in electricity consumption. Therefore, heat dissipation has become a crucial requirement for users," Yuan said.

As for the top 10 systems, IBM-built supercomputers Summit and Sierra remain the top two.

The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer developed by China's National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology came in No.3. 

The No.4 is Tianhe-2A, a system developed by China's National University of Defense Technology.

Although the US supercomputers have performance advantage over Chinese ones, the gap is narrowing. The list showed that the aggregate performance of US supercomputers stood at 37.8 percent, down 0.6 percentage points from six months ago. By contrast, that of Chinese supercomputers was 31.9 percent, up 2 percentage points during the same period.

Many Chinese-made supercomputers still use imported chips like Intel, but the home-developed Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer has adopted domestically made chips, Yuan said. 

"All Chinese supercomputers are expected to use domestic chips in the future, as pointed out by China's guidance on the development of supercomputers," he said.

Started in 1993, the TOP500 Supercomputers list ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world.

Posted in: INDUSTRIES

blog comments powered by Disqus