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Taiwan lags far behind China in the supercomputer race
Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, Taipei [Tuesday 28 June 2005]
With only two installations in the newest TOP500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers, Taiwan is again placed behind countries such as Mexico, the Netherlands and Spain, while China has moved another step up in the supercomputer race. Holding 19 positions in the list, two more compared to the previous edition of the TOP500 published in November 2004, China is now fifth in the nation ranking, behind only the US (277 positions), Germany (40), the UK (32) and Japan (23).
While Taiwan has appeared in the TOP500 since the first edition of the list released in June 1993, with only one absence in June 1999, China only had a total of seven mentions in the first 17 editions of the list. However, starting from the 18th edition in November 2001, China has been ramping up the number of its supercomputing installations quickly. Last year in November, China surpassed Italy and France for the first time to take its current place in the nation ranking. These days, many experts are seeing this positioning as a reflection of China’s technology prowess, and they predict further advances.
TOP500 installations located in Taiwan and China (1993–2005).
Source: www.top500.org, compiled by DigiTimes.com, June 2005.
Installed this year at the China Meteorological Administration, the highest-ranked China’s supercomputer (18th position in the list) is an IBM eServer pSeries 655 system equipped with 3,200 Power4+ 1.7GHz processors. Running the AIX operating system, it is focused on conducting weather and climate research. With its Linpack benchmark performance of 10.31 TFLOPS (“teraflops”, or trillions of floating-point operations per second), the system has about 1/14 of the power of the top-ranked IBM BlueGene/L System, a joint development between IBM and the US DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Installed at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, the top supercomputer has reached a new record Linpack benchmark performance of 136.8 TFLOPS.
The most powerful of Taiwan’s supercomputers, the HP BL-20P blade cluster used by an unnamed gaming company in Taipei, currently has 800 Intel Xeon 2.8GHz processors and is clocked at about 2.2 TFLOPS. The system was installed this year and now ranks 152nd in the TOP500 list. The other Taiwan system in the current list is an HP Integrity rx2600 cluster platform equipped with 384 Intel Itanium 2 1.5GHz processors and ranked 215th. Completed in 2004 with a score of 1.89 TFLOPS, this system is the property of the National Center for High-performance Computing in Hsinchu. Both of Taiwan’s current members of the TOP500 elite run on Linux.
Four of China’s 19 supercomputers are mentioned in the current edition of the TOP500 list as built by a local system builder, Dawning, Galactic Computing or Lenovo. There is no Taiwan company represented in the list as a system builder, and this is not a surprise. Although Taiwan is undoubtedly keeping its strength as a world-leading component supplier, its weakness in system-level technologies remains.
For example, Taipei-based Tyan Computer was chosen by China’s Dawning as motherboard supplier for its Dawning 4000A supercomputer, according to sources. Completed last year at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center and currently ranked 31st, the system scored 8.06 TFLOPS to achieve 10th position in the 23rd edition of the TOP500 list released in June 2004. At that time, it was the most powerful Chinese supercomputer, but then its crown was lost to the system at the China Meteorological Administration.
Another Taipei-headquartered supplier, Chenbro Micom, shipped its server chassis to Russian cluster-solutions developer T-Platforms, and this chassis was used as a component of the SKIF K-1000 supercomputer, the companies said recently at Computex. The system was installed last year in the United Institute of Informatics Problems in Minsk, Belarus, and is currently ranked 174th in the TOP500 list. However, there is no Taiwan-based system integrator utilizing Tyan motherboards or Chenbro chassis in its own TOP500-level supercomputer development.
High-performance computing was one of the hot topics at this year’s Computex. Iwill, headquartered in Hsinchuang, Taipei County, teamed up with US-based PathScale to showcase a promising low-latency Linux cluster solution utilizing the Iwill DK8-HTX motherboard and PathScale’s InfiniPath HTX adapter card. Designed for MPI (message passing interface) applications and based on InfiniBand interconnect technology, the solution is suitable for TOP500-level projects, according to Harry Hirschman, director of PathScale’s InfiniPath marketing unit. “We are now in talks to partner in building a cluster of a size that could be in the top ten,” he said. Iwill was unavailable for comment.
IBM is keeping its crown as a builder of the most powerful supercomputers in the world with now six positions in the top 10, including the first and second, and all of these six are PowerPC-based machines. IBM processors now power 77 of the TOP500 systems, up from 62 in November 2004. However, it is still far behind the number of Intel-powered systems in the list, which is currently 333. Hewlett-Packard CPUs ranked third with 36 systems and AMD fourth with 25 systems. The numbers of both HP- and AMD-powered systems dropped from the November 2004 list.
In terms of individual processors, Intel currently has 232,674 CPUs installed in the TOP500 machines, up from 196,277 in November 2004. However, this is only enough for second place since IBM more than doubled the number of its CPUs in use in the TOP500 systems over the last half a year, from 117,226 to 251,502. AMD went ahead of HP with 33,568 processors against 22,560 in the current list. In November 2004, HP had 26,480 CPUs while AMD had 24,536.
Rapidly rising to prominence from just one system in the June 2002 list, Intel Xeon processors now power more than half of the TOP500 machines. In total, there are 170,562 Xeon CPUs in 251 systems in the current TOP500 list, and 35,214 of them support the EM64T, 64-bit extension to the IA-32 architecture. Last year, Xeon processors powered 223 of the TOP500 systems in the June list and 232 in November.
The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee.
Iwill and PathScale showcased their InfiniBand-based interconnect solution for high-performance Linux clusters this month at Computex. The companies are now in talks to partner in building a cluster of a size that could be in the top ten in the TOP500 list, according to Harry Hirschman, director of PathScale’s InfiniPath marketing unit.
Photo: Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com, June 2005.
