Age of Great Chinese Dragon: Supercomputer Centers and High Performance Computing
Andrey Molyakov · Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering · 2019
Author describes Chinese supercomputer centers and networks. There are currently five National Supercomputing Centers in China, which are established in Tianjin, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Jinan, and Chang-Sha. These cities were selected as pilot ones for conducting an experiment on the development of the cloud computing services market. The directions of evolutionary and innovative development of exaflops supercomputers are highlighted in Pacific region. The evolutionary approach is the simplest and allows you to quickly get the result, but the created supercomputer of this type will be effective only when solving a narrow class of problems and have low energy efficiency. An innovative approach involves basic research and the development of innovative technologies, which is much more complicated and requires more time. Innovative technologies for the development of exaflops supercomputers, due to the stringent requirements of energy efficiency and productivity efficiency, have much in common with technologies for creating highly efficient on-board and embedded systems. These technologies are called exascale, they should provide the ability to create single-board on-board supercomputers of the teraflops level and single-rack supercomputers of the petaflops level of performance. The main problems of creating exaflops (exascale) systems: increasing the overall performance of the system by three orders of magnitude while weakening the influence of Moore's law on the performance of an individual processor core; minimization of energy losses and performance losses associated with data access, information transfer at all levels of the supercomputer hierarchy and data storage.