US guru says China’s supercomputer power may exceed all countries but flies under the radar because of sanctions

[beijingwalker]

US guru says China’s supercomputer power may exceed all countries but flies under the radar because of sanctions​

• Jack Dongarra, professor, Turing laureate and co-founder of TOP500 supercomputer list, says China still produces the most ultra-fast computers
• He speculates having the world’s No.1 computer may ‘cause the US to take actions against China that would further restrict technologies from flowing into China’

Published: 10:25pm, 14 Sep, 2023

Turing Award laureate and University of Tennessee Professor Jack Dongarra spoke at a workshop on exascale high-performance computing software and algorithms in Beijing last month. Photo: Jack Dongarra

A US supercomputer guru says three next-generation supercomputers may already be up and running in China, a greater number than any other country, but that the world knows little about them because of US sanctions.

The Chinese exascale computers, like their United States counterpart at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, are expected to perform at least one quintillion – or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 – calculations per second and they may have a higher peak performance, said Turing Award laureate and University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra.

Dongarra said Chinese scientists seemed to be “quite proud of the machines they have”, even though those machines have never appeared on the TOP500 list – the most influential ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputer systems in the world.

Dongarra, who attended a workshop on exascale high-performance computing software and algorithms in Beijing last month, made the comments in an interview with the South China Morning Post after his return to the US.

“It’s a well known situation that China has these computers, and they have been operating for a while. They have not run the benchmarks, but [the community has] a general idea of their architectures and capabilities based on research papers published to describe the science coming out of those machines,” he said.

The Frontier system built and hosted by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab was at the top of the most recent TOP500 list released in June.

Based on the HPL score, a technical way of measuring the performance of supercomputers, it had a rate of execution nearly triple that of the second placed machine, the Fugaku supercomputer based in Kobe, Japan. This made it the only exascale system on the chart.

In 2018, Chinese state media reported that the country had completed three prototype exascale systems: the Sunway OceanLight developed by the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi, the Tianhe-3 by the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, and one by the Chinese company Sugon for the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen.

Dongarra said that absence of top Chinese computers from official rankings was likely to be a result of geopolitical tensions in recent years.

Previously, Chinese institutions and companies were enthusiastic about submitting details of their machines and benchmark runs to the TOP500 list.

“Being a top 10 on the list was a big deal and seen as a trophy a country had to boast about,” said Dongarra, who is a co-founder of the list.

In 2013, the Tianhe-2 system developed by China’s National University of Defence Technology surpassed Oak Ridge’s Titan to become the most powerful supercomputer, challenging US dominance in the area.
Two years later, the US government banned Intel from selling chips to help upgrade Tianhe-2. In 2021, seven supercomputer centres involved in developing China’s next-generation supercomputers were blacklisted by the US.

Dongarra said that although more supercomputer builders in China had stopped reporting their machines in the past two years, some continued to put their computers forward for ranking.

“Maybe having the No.1 computer would make news and put China under the spotlight. It can cause the US to take actions against China that would further restrict technologies from flowing into China.”

As the number of supercomputers in China being reported kept shrinking, it lost the No 1 position in terms of the total number of machines among the Top500, he said.

“However, China is still the country which produces the most supercomputers. With domestic and Western-designed chips, supercomputers assembled in China are sold all over the world, including the US.”

Dongarra, who met officials from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to discuss potential communication, interaction and partnership during his trip to Beijing, said international cooperation was important.

A significant part of today’s science was driven by computer simulation, and the countries with the biggest computers could do the best science, he said. However, building a new supercomputer system was labour-intensive and required a lot of funding.

“If the global community can better leverage resources, we’ll be able to avoid duplication in our work and collaborate more effectively.”

Exclusive: US guru says China’s supercomputer power may exceed all countries

Jack Dongarra, professor, Turing laureate and co-founder of TOP500 list, says China still produces the most supercomputers.

www.scmp.com

 

[beijingwalker]

China May Have Unmatched Supercomputer Abilities, Third Exascale Machine Apparently Online​

By Francisco Pires
published September 10 2023

China's third Exascale supercomputer reportedly comes online.

(Image credit: National Supercomputing Center - Wuxi, China.)

One of the top minds in supercomputing has a warning for the West. Jack Dongarra, an industry luminary, Turing award laureate, and co-founder of TOP500, says the US is likely behind China in the exascale supercomputing race. It appears that a third Chinese exascale supercomputer, long thought to be halted indefinitely due to the impact of US sanctions, has come online. Meanwhile, the US currently only has two exascale machines, Frontier and Aurora, in operation.

When Dongarra says China might have the lead, it isn't taken lightly. China hasn't submitted its fastest exascale-class supercomputers to the Top500 list, the de-facto supercomputer listing and benchmarking process that's responsible for bringing clarity to how the world stands in processing capability, fearing that it will draw the attention of US regulators, thus triggering more sanctions. It follows that the official picture provided by the Top500 isn't an accurate representation of reality as it is missing data.

According to the TOP500, China comes in at a distant 7th (with the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer) and 10th place (Tianhe-2) - trillions of calculations per second away from the top dog, the US-based (and AMD-powered) Frontier exascale computer. This isn't a picture of reality.

"It’s a well known situation that China has these computers, and they have been operating for a while," Dongarra told the South China Morning Post. "They have not run the benchmarks, but [the community has] a general idea of their architectures and capabilities based on research papers published to describe the science coming out of those machines."

The TOP500 highlights as of June 2023 show that China doesn't even crack the top 5 out of the world's supercomputers. The US, AMD-made Frontier takes top spot, while Japan's Arm-based Fugaku takes second. (Image credit: TOP500)

We know China has installed two exascale-class supercomputers — China doesn't submit its machines to the Top500 list, but it has submitted results for two of these machines for the Gordon Bell Prize. This yearly award recognizes "outstanding achievement in high-performance computing" based on the types of science run on the machines.

However, according to the SCMP article, it appears that a third machine, which hasn't been submitted for the prize, has now come also online.

China has submitted two machines for the Gordon Bell Prize: The Sunway OceanLight, which was developed by the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi, and the Tianhe-3 from the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, which was crunching AI workloads before it became mainstream.

(Image credit: HPC Wire)

However, there's also a third unnamed supercomputer, purportedly made by China-based Sugon, at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen. This machine hasn't been submitted for the prize, and the project has long been thought to be halted indefinitely due to Sugon being placed on the blacklist in 2019. The company also lost access to the Hygon CPUs, a series of China-produced x86 processors based on AMD's Zen design, that it planned to use because US sanctions shut down AMD's joint venture that produced the processors. It's unclear which processors are being used for the machine.


The TOP500, being a voluntary listing, means that most won't step up to the task. And when we consider the current geopolitical climate, one can see it isn't conducive to transparency, openness, or a "head first" participation style.

"Maybe having the No.1 computer would make news and put China under the spotlight," Dongarra told the SCMP. "It can cause the US to take actions against China that would further restrict technologies from flowing into China."

It's interesting how Dongarra's observation maps onto reality: China having the top supercomputer would definitely make the news. And when it comes to tech restrictions being imposed or aggravated, we've had a couple of years of that already.

“However, China is still the country which produces the most supercomputers. With domestic and Western-designed chips, supercomputers assembled in China are sold all over the world, including the US,” said Dongarra.

We've all felt the consequences of the sanctions at some point or another. Of course, there's still the open question of whether the sanctions are actually doing what they are intended to - restrict China's ability to catch up to the U.S. technologically and economically. Chinese companies being publicly bullish about recouping sanction-imposed losses in a year's time has to put at least a question mark over their effectiveness in the first place.

China May Have Unmatched Supercomputer Abilities, Third Exascale Machine Apparently Online

China's third Exascale supercomputer reportedly comes online.

www.tomshardware.com