China’s massive system runs real applications and is ‘not just a stunt machine,’ says top U.S. supercomputing researcher 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. http://www.computerworld.com/articl...-fastest-supercomputer-without-u-s-chips.html
Very Interesting. Floating point operations on most computers, even years ago, can be executed without memory access, as the target data and results are stored in high speed hardwired storage, Floating point Registers. Measuring a computer by the speed of this function is cute. I wrote quite a bit of code in my day in the industry, most of it in the nitty gritty IOS area and dispatching for data managers. I don't think I ever had the need to code a floating point operation! Now I knew of people to contrive ways to use those functions but it was really for kicks. The real use of those functions almost always generated by number crunching applications generated by a compiler like Fortran, PL1, and AlGOR. What is the equivalent in Windows or Apple? The Corps of Engineers is famous for generating applications that stress the hell out of floating point functions, in their flood predictions modeling and what if modeling they do to try and predict the results of river channel alterations. More often than not, they are mystified by the resulting floating point data they get out of a run. Then nearly as often the theory of incompleteness is in control.
FlOPS (Floating point Operations Per Second) is a good measurement because these supercomputers are used to do a lot of math.
Hey now! Careful who you pick on! Did you know most scientific programs that actually do a lot of floating point calculations also move a lot of data in and out of the system. So much data that the instruction count can be as high a 2000 to one IOS and data handling instruction for each floating point calculation The standard instruction set of a computer are used in data handling. Flops is a meaningless number to that standard instructions set. Mips and Bips are the count. Oh, I forgot, it's Gips now instead of Bips. Hard to keep up But it is really a special case when the Flopper can beat the Gipper.
It always seems like the Chinese are trying to outdo the Western World when it comes to technology just for the sake of it. Western World builds a Nuclear Fusion Reactor...... China announces..... "AAAAH..... We are building he biggest nuclear fusion reactor ever conceived. Your puny capitalist minds have not conceived of such grandeur." Western World build a Large Hadron Collidor..... "AHHHHHH...... We are building a Collidor that makes yours look like a peanut!" It's like you get a toy and your cousin comes over sees it and gets jealous. He comes over to your house the next day with a newer, better model.
