[Igor Antunov]

China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors.

There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops, according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers. It is the first system to exceed 100 petaflops. A petaflop equals one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second.

The most important thing about Sunway TaihuLight may be its microprocessors. In the past, China has relied heavily on U.S. microprocessors in building its supercomputing capacity. The world's next fastest system, China's Tianhe-2, which has a peak performance of 54.9 petaflops, uses Intel Xeon processors.

TaihuLight, which is installed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise.

The TaihuLight is "very impressive," said Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top500 supercomputing list, in a report about the new system.

TaihuLight is running "sizeable applications," which include advanced manufacturing, earth systems modeling, life science and big data applications, said Dongarra. This "shows that the system is capable of running real applications and [is] not just a stunt machine," Dongarra said.

It has been long known that China was developing a 100-plus petaflop system, and it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level. But just over a year ago, in a surprising move, the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers.

The U.S. initiated this ban because China, it claimed, was using its Tianhe-2 system for nuclear explosive testing activities. The U.S. stopped live nuclear testing in 1992 and now relies on computer simulations. Critics in China suspected the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts.

Four months after the Intel ban, in July 2015, the White House issued an executive order creating a "national strategic computing initiative" with the goal of maintaining an "economic leadership position" in high-performance computing research.

The U.S. order seemed late. China has been steadily building its supercomputing capacity, which included efforts to develop its own microprocessors. It produced a relatively small supercomputer in 2011 that relied on homegrown processors, but its big systems continued to rely on U.S. processors.

There has been nothing secretive about China's intentions. Researchers and analysts have been warning all along that U.S. exascale (an exascale is 1,000 petaflops) development, supercomputing's next big milestone, was lagging.

It's not just China that is racing ahead. Japan and Russia have their own development efforts. Europe is building supercomputers using ARM processors, and, similar to China, wants to decrease its dependency on U.S.-made chips.

China's government last week said it plans to build an exascale system by 2020. The U.S. has targeted 2023.

China now has more supercomputers in the Top500 list than the U.S., said Dongarra. "China has 167 systems on the June 2016 Top500 list compared to 165 systems in the U.S," he said, in an email. Ten years ago, China had 10 systems on the list.

Of all the supercomputers represented on the global list, the sum of the China supercomputers performance (211 petaflops) has exceeded the performance of the supercomputers in the U.S., (173 petaflops) represented on this list. The list doesn't represent the universe of all supercomputers in the U.S. None of the supercomputers used by intelligence agencies, for instance, are represented on this list.

"This is the first time the U.S. has lost the lead," said Dongarra, in the total number of systems on the Top500 list.

China's work is also winning global peer recognition. It's work on TaihuLight has resulted in three submissions selected as finalists for supercomputing's prestigious Gordon Bell Award, named for a pioneer in high-performance computing.

The fastest U.S. supercomputer, number 3 on the Top500 list, is the Titan, a Cray supercomputer at U.S. Dept. of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory with a theoretical peak of about 27 petaflops.

Whether the U.S. chip ban accelerated China's resolve to develop its own microprocessor technology is a question certain to get debate. But what is clear is China's longstanding goal to end reliance on U.S. technology.

"The Chinese were already determined over time to move to an indigenous processor," said Steve Conway, a high performance computing analyst at IDC. "I think the ban accelerates that -- it increases that determination," he said.

HPC has become increasingly important in the economy. Once primarily the domain of big science research, national security and high-end manufacturing such as airplane design, HPC's virtualization and big data analysis capabilities have made it critical in almost every industry. Manufacturers of all sizes, increasingly, are using supercomputers to design products virtually instead of building prototypes. Supercomputer are also used in applications such as fraud detection and big data analysis.

HPC has is now "so strategic that you really don't want to rely on foreign sources for it," said Conway.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/30 ... chips.html

Long story short, China relied on intel cpu's to build supercomputing clusters that exceed anything the US can build (due to the introduction of a proprietary interconnect). US responds by issuing an embargo, effectively blocking intel chip sales to Chinese government companies. China responds mere months later by becoming the world's leading super-computing power, and is no longer reliant on US technology at all to further that lead. Indigenous chips make intel cry.

[Political Interest]

This suggests that China's IT industry has the potential to surpass that of America.

By the 2040s China will be on par with the United States.

[ThirdTerm]

It has been long known that China was developing a 100-plus petaflop system, and it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level. But just over a year ago, in a surprising move, the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers.

The U.S. initiated this ban because China, it claimed, was using its Tianhe-2 system for nuclear explosive testing activities. The U.S. stopped live nuclear testing in 1992 and now relies on computer simulations. Critics in China suspected the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts.

Four months after the Intel ban, in July 2015, the White House issued an executive order creating a "national strategic computing initiative" with the goal of maintaining an "economic leadership position" in high-performance computing research.

In April last year, the US State Department set up an embargo that blocked the sales of Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors to Chinese institutions but the Intel ban came too late. Chinese computer mechanics may have already copied these Intel processors to manufacture alternative products. Or Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors could have been supplied from elsewhere in China as only four of China's top supercomputing research centers are on the banned list, rather than the entire country. The embargo is ineffective if these Intel processors still can be imported to China.

[Igor Antunov]

SW chips aren't copies of anything (intel is x86). They are risc based and initially designed for Chinese military to bypass backdoors inherent in US hardware. They no doubt have their own backdoors. They are also achieving 6 gigaflops per watt, which is more efficient than intels 6th generation skylake architecture.

The creator of the top500 stated as much, this is an indigenous design and it has US government spooked.

[mikema63]

This suggests that China's IT industry has the potential to surpass that of America.

By the 2040s China will be on par with the United States.

Not necessarily. It's rather hard to predict what IT will look like in just 5 years, much less a few decades. We're running up on the physical limits of microprocessors and are likely to stall unless we figure out quantum computing or something like that.

[DrSteveBrule]

This suggests that China's IT industry has the potential to surpass that of America.

By the 2040s China will be on par with the United States.

Everyone knows that India is going to win the IT revolution by having the most programmers.

[supersizeme]

China will probably surpass America in component manufacturing. Other IT fields? No way.

[Harmattan]

I am not sure all of this will still matter by 2040 but China will have a hell of a marketing task if it wants its firms to succeed in foreign markets. On B2B they are even less trustable than American firms (systematic and overt corporate spying and domination - discriminating Chinese employees should be legal at this stage) and attractiveness for consumers is about zero (China = workers exploitation, state police, minorities oppression, Chinese supremacism). China is 150% about hard power and 0% about soft power.

That being said I do not not think they want to compete with us and conquer our markets. I think they want to maintain an air gap between China and the rest of the world to better control Chinese people, and touch the outer world only to grab resources, technologies and ideas. Their main concern seems to keep China together, prevent an explosion and control independentists, reformists, and all individuals and movements contesting the power.

[unbalanced zealot]

This suggests that China's IT industry has the potential to surpass that of America.

By the 2040s China will be on par with the United States.

China has the potential long term, but in the medium term it has a lot of impediments. The main issue is probably quality control. A company such as Samsung Electronics (SEC) has extremely robust quality control (based on six sigma) where-as for general manufacturing most Chinese companies have systemic quality control problems. SEC does a lot of assembly in China but it withdrew chip manufacturing from there (and based it all in Suwon, South Korea) because of constant quality issues when its chips were being sourced from China (even with Korean management oversight). In the consumer electronics industry even occasional chip failures are a big drain on end profits and a big reputation issue. For China to really emerge as a leading consumer IT manufacturer its companies will need to address their quality control measures in a major way.

Having said that ... it seems from this article that in specialist high end IT China is really making up some ground.

[Igor Antunov]

China is already the leading component and telco equipment provider globally. It absolutely dominates IT infrastructure in terms of hardware. Software-wise the largest and most developed eCommerce online marketplace providers are Chinese. You can order an item wholesale and it will be delivered the next day anywhere in China, and within a week anywhere in the world. Amazon can't compete.

It is catching up in microprocessors, by 2020 we should have some consumer desktop chips as alternatives to AMD and Intel offerings. I hope AMD's upcoming Zen chips are competitive with intels. I'm getting tired of the monopoly.

[Harmattan]

China is already the leading component and telco equipment provider globally. It absolutely dominates IT infrastructure in terms of hardware. Software-wise the largest and most developed eCommerce online marketplace providers are Chinese. You can order an item wholesale and it will be delivered the next day anywhere in China, and within a week anywhere in the world. Amazon can't compete.

Amazon can deliver anything to my home in a day and their crappy site is less crappy than AliBaba's, and their prices are comparable or lower. They are already more competitive than them in the west and they will likely remain for a long time.

Plenty of actors can deliver in a day, this is not significant. What differentiates them is the offer and site quality - specialized shops have the edge - and prices. Amazon and AliBaba bloomed when the online shopping was a barren land. But with the modern competition their webshops will probably only survive as bazaars for odd products (thermometers, cooking tools, etc).

Their true future is in cloud and logistics as a service, and Amazon definitely has a big lead everywhere in the world but in China. No one will easily make them bulge.

It is catching up in microprocessors, by 2020 we should have some consumer desktop chips as alternatives to AMD and Intel offerings. I hope AMD's upcoming Zen chips are competitive with intels. I'm getting tired of the monopoly.

The problem with microprocessors today is that it may become a low-value industry. This is because innovation has slowed down so much that giants cannot hold their lead. This is more welcoming for competitors but those are bad news.

So either someone finds a way to rebreath a fast innovation, either computing will stagnate and plenty of no-name brands will compete on price.