Supercomputer Race Heats Up as China Bans Exports of High-Performance Machines

[timosman]

http://europe.newsweek.com/supercom...bans-exports-high-performance-machines-331175

China is curbing exports of its high-performance machines in an apparent attempt to stay one step ahead of the U.S. in a race for the world's fastest supercomputer.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs issued a joint statement on Friday announcing restrictions on the export of supercomputers and high-performance drones, the Wall Street Journal reported. Exporters will need to obtain a license to sell computers with an operating capacity exceeding 8 teraflops—the equivalent of performing more than eight trillion calculations per second—abroad. The announcement also placed restrictions on drone exports, applicable to high-performance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of flying for more than one hour consistently and dealing with inclement weather, as well as drones capable of hovering at heights of 1.5 km, according to the South China Morning Post.

The announcement cited unspecified national security concerns as the reason for the restrictions. However, provisions come just months after the U.S. blocked a shipment of tens of thousands of chips from American firm Intel to China, which were due to be used to update Tianhe-2, currently the fastest supercomputer in the world. The U.S. Department of Commerce said Intel's application to export had been blocked because Tianhe-2 and three other Chinese supercomputers were being used for "nuclear explosive activities."

 

[CPUd]

Tianhe-2 is barely operational these days. They cut corners on their cooling setup and crammed the chips too close together just so they could run LINPACK fast enough to take #1. ORNL Summit will take #1 when it comes online in 2018; it will be using IBM POWER 9 CPUs and NVidia GPUs that do not require crossing a central bus to communicate, looks like this:

Estimated speed is around 300 petaflops using 20% the power consumption of Tianhe-2.

 

[Ronin Truth]

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