In order to maintain its competitiveness in supercomputer research and development, the EU recently announced that it will invest 1 billion euros to develop two world-class supercomputer systems, and expects to eventually surpass China, the United States and Japan.
Visual ChinaAlthough the basic components of a supercomputer are not much different from those of a personal computer, as a computer with the strongest functions, the fastest computing speed, and the largest storage capacity, supercomputers have always been regarded as "the heavy weapon of the country" and are the countries of the world. The commanding heights of technology competition are also an important indicator of a country's scientific and technological strength.
When it comes to supercomputers, everyone may feel that they are far away from daily life, but it is not. "Supercomputing as a strategic technology, its application is not limited to basic scientific research, it is playing an important role in the field of national security. In fact, all aspects of our lives are closely related to supercomputers. Yang Guangwen, a professor at Tsinghua University and director of the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center, told reporters.
In the fields of oil exploration, high-end equipment manufacturing, biomedicine, animation design, etc., supercomputers have broad application prospects. For example, with the help of supercomputer simulations, scientists can screen effective drug compounds from hundreds of thousands or even millions of compounds in a relatively short period of time, which not only saves a lot of money to buy real compounds, but also greatly shortens The cycle of drug development.
In the newly released list of the world's supercomputer TOP500, China's "Shenwei·Taihu Light" supercomputer has a peak computing power of 1.25 billion times per second and 9.3 billion times of continuous computing power per second. Win the championship. Its 1 minute computing power is equivalent to 7.2 billion Earth people who use the calculator to calculate 32 years without interruption.
"At present, China is the only country with a computing power of more than 10 billion times per second. The computing speed of supercomputers in other countries is about several billion times per second, about two or three billion times. The United States may launch a supercomputer with a computing speed of about 20 billion times per second." Fu Wei, an associate professor at Tsinghua University and deputy director of the National Supercomputing Wuxi Center, told reporters.
China has not only achieved international leadership in the computing performance of supercomputers, but also ranked among the best in the number of supercomputers. In the list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, China accounted for 202 and the United States accounted for 143.
Tens of thousands of people working together and coordinating difficultiesThis time, the European Union wants to reverse the trend and develop the world's fastest supercomputer. It also needs to clear a lot of technical "roadblocks."
For example, China's "Shenwei·Taihu Light" installed 40,960 China's self-developed "Shenwei 26010" many-core processor, while a processor has 260 cores, a total of more than 10 million cores.
In Yang Guangwen's view, how to uniformly dispatch tens of millions of cores and enable applications to effectively allocate computing tasks to these cores is a focus of attention in the field of supercomputer development. "More than 10 million nuclear to solve a problem is equivalent to one person directing tens of millions of people to work. If it is not scientifically managed, it is difficult to maximize the efficiency of everyone's work. The same is true for supercomputers. The technical difficulty of unified scheduling is also multi-faceted." Yang Guangwen said.
Yang Guangwen said that the first is chip technology, to determine what kind of chip is most suitable; the second is the chip interconnect technology, so many chips, what method is the most efficient combination; the third is power consumption, to minimize power consumption; Management technology, how to manage so many chips, how to find problems in time; finally, after the hardware is completed, there must be an application, which forms a super-computing ecology, which needs continuous improvement and constant updating. Therefore, in order to develop the world's fastest supercomputer, a full range of technological breakthroughs are needed.
Fu Wei also said that although the research and development of supercomputers in the EU has lagged behind in recent years due to financial problems, in fact, the EU has accumulated corresponding technology in the research and development of supercomputers, such as chip research and development and system manufacturing.
The next step in the supercomputer wins the battle of applicationAt the same time, the European Union’s proposal to develop the fastest supercomputer has also triggered discussions among netizens about the future direction of supercomputers.
"Actually, everyone is now exploring the development direction of the next generation of supercomputers, but so far there is no conclusion. There is no clear statement on the structure or the technical solutions adopted, and everyone is still studying, all countries are I am exploring." Yang Guangwen said.
Fu Wei said that the next generation of supercomputers will certainly improve in speed, but there will be changes in the application level. Traditional high-performance computers are more used for simulation work, but in recent years there have been more and more applications for big data. Future supercomputers may focus on the integration of computing and big data.
The international supercomputer community has locked the supercomputer's next speed peak to E-class, billions of times per second. Professor Qian Depei, the head of the national special project of the "863 Program High-Performance Computer and Its Core Software", said: "In terms of speed, billions of times is equivalent to 10 times the fastest computer now; in computing Density, communication speed, power consumption and other aspects have increased by an order of magnitude. "At present, billions of computers have become the "commanding heights" of fierce competition in the world. At the same time, Yang Guangwen also said that in the next generation of super-competition competition, China must not only win the battle of speed, but also win the battle of application.
For a long time, applications have been considered as the main shortcomings of China's super-computer development.
But in Yang Guangwen's view, things have changed. He said that so far, "Shenwei·Taihu Light" has completed 17 applications, and has achieved some application results in important fields such as weather, climate, aerospace and marine science. In recent years, China has made great progress in the application of supercomputers, and has also received great attention from relevant researchers abroad.
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