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The United States has regained the crown of enviable speed in computing with a powerful new supercomputer in Tennessee, a milestone for technology that plays an important role in science, medicine and other fields.
Frontier, named after the massive machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was announced Monday as the first to show the performance of one quintillion operations per second (one billion billion calculations) in a series of standardized tests used by researchers to rank supercomputers. The US Department of Energy committed $1.8 billion a few years ago to build three systems with this “exascale” performance, as the scientists call it.
But the crown has a warning. Some experts believe Frontier has been beaten in the exascale race by the two systems in China. The operators of these systems did not submit test results for evaluation by the scientists who supposedly oversaw the systems. Top 500 ranking. Experts said they suspect the reason why the Chinese didn’t present test results could be due to tensions between the US and China.
“There are rumors that something is going on in China,” said Jack Dongarra, a distinguished computer science professor at the University of Tennessee who led the Top500 study. “Nothing official”
Supercomputers have long been a flashpoint in international competition. Room-sized machines were first built to break codes and design weapons, but now also play important roles in vaccine development, testing car designs, and modeling climate change.
This space has been dominated by US technology for decades, but China has become a dominant power. There, a system called Sunway TaihuLight was named the fastest in the world from 2016 to 2018. In the latest Top500 list, China made 173 systems compared to 126 machines in the United States.
Japan became a smaller but still strong competitor. A system called Fugaku in Kobe became #1 in June 2020, replacing an IBM system in Oak Ridge.
Frontier gives this top position back to the lab. Built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise using two types of chips from Advanced Micro Devices, the system was more than twice as fast as the Fugaku in tests used by the Top500 organization.
“This is a proud moment for our nation,” said Thomas Zacharia, director of Oak Ridge, at an online briefing at an industry event in Germany. “It reminds us that we can go after something bigger than ourselves.”
Mr. Zacharia said the system, which consists of 74 cabins, each weighing 8,000 pounds, has been made more difficult to set up due to problems obtaining components in the pandemic and supply chain crisis. But he predicted that Frontier would quickly have a major impact in examining the impact of Covid and helping, for example, the transition to cleaner energy sources.
Chinese researchers would participate in the sequencing process. However, as the United States has taken a series of steps to slow China’s technological advances, the country has adopted a lower profile in promoting supercomputer progress – including making it harder for some Chinese companies to acquire foreign chips that could be used to make supercomputers. .
But China is making significant progress in designing its own microprocessors, which are key to advances in supercomputers. David Kahaner, an authority in the field at the head of the Asia Technology Information Programme, reported last year details of two exascale-class supercomputers that he says use Chinese chip technology.
According to a presentation Mr. Kahaner shared at a technical conference, one of them is the successor to the previous Sunway machine called the OceanLight. The other machine, the Tianhe-3, replaced a system called the Tianhe-1A, which was the first Chinese machine to hit #1 on the Top500 list in 2010.
Further evidence that China is breaking through the exascale barrier comes in November when a group of 14 Chinese researchers won the Gordon Bell Prize, a prestigious award from the Association for Computing Machinery, for simulating a quantum computing circuit in the new Sunway system operating at Exascale speeds. appeared. . In a technical paper, the researchers reported that the computational job that was estimated to take 10,000 years on Oak Ridge’s previous fastest supercomputer took 304 seconds on the Chinese system.
“They let it leak that their machine was overworked,” said Steve Conway, an analyst at Hyperion Research. “Most of the speculation is that they don’t want to attract more US sanctions.”
Mr Conway and other experts said they believe the chips in the new Chinese machines are made in Taiwan, which is also true for the key chips at Frontier. China said it lags far behind in its advanced chip-making capability.
In addition to helping scientists, the Oak Ridge machine can help suppliers popularize some new products. Mr. Zacharia said Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which acquired supercomputer pioneer Cray in 2019, has contributed a network technology called SlingShot, which has had a significant impact on Frontier’s performance.
AMD contributed not only to microprocessors, but also to a type of graphics processing chip sold for supercomputers by a competitor, Nvidia. The same two AMD chips have been selected for an exascale system called El Capitan, which is scheduled to be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in 2023.
A third exascale machine from Intel, using three types of chips, was first scheduled to be delivered in 2021 at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. However, manufacturing issues at Intel delayed this system, which was expected later this year.
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