China's Indigenous Supercomputing Strategy Bears F...

China's Indigenous Supercomputing Strategy Bears First Fruit

As we recapped last week, the Sunway BlueLight MPP, installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, is being powered by 8,704 ShenWei SW1600 processors. The resulting machine delivers just a over a petaflop of performance, with a Linpack rating of 796 teraflops. That will probably place it somewhere between 15th and 20th place on the upcoming TOP500 list, assuming the engineers at Jinan sent their submission in on time.

Impressively, its power consumption of just one megawatt will make it one of the more power-efficient of CPU-only supercomputers in the work. Running Linpack, BlueLight delivers 741 megaflops/watt, which would place it in the top ten of the current Green500, a list that ranks the energy efficiency of supercomputers.

Perhaps even more impressively, this was all accomplished with CPUs built on 65nm process technology, which is two generations behind what can be had at most of the major fabs today. According to the presentation last week, the domestic ShenWei chip is a 16-core, 64-bit RISC processor running between 0.975 - 1.2 GHz. Assuming a frequency of 1.1 GHz, the CPU will can deliver a peak double precision floating point performance of 140.8 gigaflops. Note that if the 8,704 CPUs were running at that speed, the machine would actually deliver 1.2 peak petaflops, not the claimed 1.07 petaflops. Apparently the supercomputer is equipped with processors clocked at the lower end of their frequency range.

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