by
Mark Ollig
Costing
$290 million to build, it performs an amazing 33.86 quadrillion calculations
per second.
That equals
33.86 Pflop/s (petaflops). If we continue to break this down, we find one
petaflop equals one quadrillion (one thousand-trillion) “flop/s” or
floating-point operations (calculations) per second.
Folks,
that’s 33,860,000,000,000,000 calculations per second.
This
powerful processing power belongs to the new Chinese supercomputer called
Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2), also called the TH-2 High Performance Computer System.
One
report states this supercomputer has the potential to reach a peak performance
of 54.9 Pflop/s.
The
TH-2 was built by China’s National University of Defense Technology, and is
currently the fastest operating computer in the world per TOP500, which rates
the 500 most powerful, commercially available computer systems.
Although
the TH-2 makes use of US Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge E5-2692 processors, and Intel
Xeon Phi 31S1P multiprocessing accelerator/co-processing chips, the
supercomputer’s system design, front-end processors, and its particular
operating software, are all Chinese- made.
There
are 3,120,000 processors in the TH-2, and it can hold 12.4 PB (Petabytes) worth
of disk storage data, or 12,697.6 TB (Terabytes), using a Global Shared
parallel storage system. It also has one petabyte of RAM (Random Access
Memory).
The
TH-2 is twice as fast as the previous world’s fastest supercomputer, made in
the US, called the Titan Cray XK7, built by Cray Inc.
The
Titan supercomputer cost around $97 million to build, and is located in the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee.
It
was brought online in October of 2012, and hopefully, you read my Nov. 26
column about it.
At
that time, I thought the Titan would reign as the world’s fastest supercomputer
for a while.
However,
as we are learning from experience, newer technology and faster computers seem
to pop up just about every year.
The
Titan operates at 17.59 Pflop/s, which means the TH-2 is nearly twice as fast,
insofar as processing power goes.
With
the increase in processing power, comes an increase in the energy needed to
operate all the associated hardware and computing components.
That
being said, it should come as no surprise the TH-2 consumes more energy than
the Titan.
Total
power consumption for the Titan is 12.7 MW (megawatts), while the TH-2 consumes
17.8 MWs.
To
keep the TH-2 supercomputer components from over-heating, a closed-coupled,
chilled customized liquid water-cooling unit is used.
The
TH-2 is housed at the National Supercomputer Center in the city of Guangzhou,
which is located in Guangdong province of southern China.
The
computing software operating system used in the TH-2 is called Kylin Linux.
China’s National University of Defense Technology developed Kylin.
One
advantage of using Kylin is its ability to support numerous microprocessors,
differently-structured computers, and other conventionally-used software
operating systems.
The
TH-2 consists of 162 computing, communication, and data storage cabinets inside
rows of frames.
A
series of lights on each cabinet will blink to show activity. The cabinet doors
have a horizontal strip of lights which will change color to indicate power
load usage.
You
can view a photo of how these lights look on the TH-2 supercomputer at:
http://tinyurl.com/mhgmvlv.
Regarding
the processors, there are 384,000 central processor cores, and 48,000
accelerator communication processor cores.
The
TH-2 uses 10 Gbps (Gigabits per second) backplanes for the transmission of data
operating between the computing nodes.
China’s
Tianhe-2 supercomputer, in addition to providing its citizens with education
and research, will deliver high-performance computing service for the people
living in the southern China region.
So,
when will the US have its next supercomputer on the playing field?
Jack
Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee, said,
“The next large acquisition of a supercomputer for the US Department of Energy
will not be until 2015.”
The
next major advancement in supercomputing, in my opinion, will come when it
breaks the exascale processing barrier.
A
future supercomputer processing 1 Eflop/s (exaflops) would possess processing
power equal to 1,000 Pflop/s (one thousand petaflops) as compared to the 54.9
Pflop/s maximum processing potential of the TH-2.
The
US Department of Energy has an Exascale Computing Initiative group currently
working on achieving 1 Eflop/s processing. In fact, they may have already come
up with an operating system strategy for it.
This
writer does not believe we will see 1 Eflop/s on a US supercomputer before
2023.
I
also once believed there would never be a better portable personal computer
than my 1995 HP OmniBook notebook PC.
Even
though it is quite technologically inferior to what I use today, I still miss
not having that old OmniBook around.
To
see some exceptional, close-up pictures of the Tianhe-2, and to learn more
about China’s new supercomputer, go to http://tinyurl.com/m27yqfn.
Hmm,
I wonder if there are any vintage OmniBooks available on eBay or Amazon.
