The previous day we shared news about a chip with a thousand independent processors inside. If you hear a laugh in the background, I can say two things: it comes from China, and its responsible is a new supercomputer called TaihuLight. According to the recent update of the Top500 list, the TaihuLight with its ten million cores is by far the fastest on the planet, almost tripling the performance of the formidable Tianhe-2. The most surprising part? It uses pure Chinese technology, without foreign chips.
For a while, the supercomputer race seemed stalled, with near absolute dominance by the Tianhe-2, based on Intel hardware. The Tianhe-2 secured first place on the Top500 list in June 2013, and the previous update (November 2015) still kept it there. However, we now have the new list for June 2016, and there are big news. Some of our readers might remember the block that Intel suffered in selling processors to the Chinese government that sought to upgrade the Tianhe-2. In response to that block, China simply cut to the chase and accelerated the development of "indigenous" technology, led by the SW26010, a 64-bit RISC processor with 260 cores (256 plus four with auxiliary functions) based on the ShenWei series, with a frequency of 1.45 GHz. A total of 40,960 of these processors make up the system TaihuLight, and besides comfortably exceeding the mark of ten million cores, it became the fastest on the planet.
Performance and Efficiency
Although all the details are published on the official Top500 page, we cannot fail to mention this: TaihuLight reached the mark of 93 PetaFLOPS, almost three times the performance of Tianhe-2, and three times more efficient. Additionally, TaihuLight manages to develop this speed with a maximum consumption of 15.37 megawatts, which also gives it a good position on the Green500 list if we consider the "performance-per-watt" parameter, with 6 GigaFLOPS/W. The exact total of cores is 10,649,600, since we must not forget those four extra cores on each chip. RAM amounts to 1.3 petabytes, something like 32 GB per processor. In relation to the number of cores, one could imagine a larger amount of RAM, but for now it's more than enough for the supercomputer to claim the top spot.
A New Global Order
Both the processors and the interconnection systems were completely designed in China, and although there are no great details about the architecture used (some believe it goes in the direction of DEC Alpha), this changes the map completely. China not only retains the first place among the world's fastest supercomputers, but also finally demonstrates the power of its local development. Due to this change, the American Titan moves to third place on the list, and the first European supercomputer to appear is in eighth place, the Swiss Piz Daint. Everything seems to indicate that Aurora won't be ready until 2019, so let's salute the new red king, TaihuLight.
Top500
