16 Mar 2011

China plans to use its own chips for supercomputers

The Chinese have climbed the ranks of supercomputing updated for several years, Tianhe I currently top of the TOP500 list. Despite the success may be the last Tianhe I, China builds supercomputer with two parts from Intel and NVIDIA. (The originally used Tianhe, 2560 Radeon 4870 X2, which it was later modified for Tesla M2050 NV plates.) According to Hu Wei, chief designer of the Academy of Sciences, the country's next candidate TOP500 (point Dawn is the most, if not all require Chinese developed a microprocessor).

Chinese developers have been working on its own CPU architecture for years, China has not the fact he wants to hardware and software designed hidden natively. This new processor (known Godson, Loongson or the dragon) is far behind Intel and AMD, but quickly change.

As the industry of a country can not always rely on foreign steel and oil, the information in China has its own processor. "said Mr. Hu Weiwu, the principal architect of microprocessors Loongson for the People's Daily newspaper." We need another decade before the chips are made ​​to do justice to domestic market in China. Hopefully, after two decades, we sell our processors in China by the United States, where they sell clothes and shoes made​​. "

The next generation 65 nm processors in a position to the next Loongson Dawning 6000 supercomputer on the MIPS64 architecture, and offer four cores in an envelope of 10 W are based in a first time, taste the expansion 20W an octal core point in the Future. A major difference between the next Godson 3B includes 200 additional instructions.

They are designed to increase performance by emulation QEMU. Details are still scarce, but we were informed that the 86 tracks run 70 percent faster than reference Loongson native binaries.

We do not know much about the current performance of Godson 3B, but the infrastructure supercomputers will ultimately determine whether the Dawn has 6000 the highest performance achieved by China is waiting. Not easy to create a network with low latency intra-node is fast enough to use the capabilities of a supercomputer. Hu Weiwu indicates that is a constant challenge, noting that Chinese and supercomputers theoretically fast enough to meet the needs of the country, but "still can not use."

Godson can not see the mass market for another 20 years have experimented with the Chinese manufacturers Godson powered netbooks / mini-PC. If Godson 3B beginnings we see examples in a few years ago at the CES and Computex.