The Race to Build the World’s Fastest Supercomputers | WSJ U.S. vs. China

- [Narrator] This is Frontier, the US supercomputer that was crowned the world's speediest this year by the TOP500 project, which ranks supercomputing systems globally. And the machine is able to do one quintillion calculations per second. Write it out, that's 18 zeros and that means it's about 2 billion times faster than a typical laptop. China's Tianhe-3 didn't participate in this ranking but some computer scientists say the machine may be as fast as Frontier. - These supercomputers are utilized to solve some of the most pressing challenges that humanity and society faces. - [Narrator] Whether it's developing more advanced spacecraft or figuring out a greener future, both countries are racing to build faster machines. So to better solve the challenges the US has opened up Frontier to scientists around the world and we got access to look inside it in order to compare its design with Tianhe-3 and see what it takes to build one of the world's speediest supercomputers. - We want to provide this level of compute capability that has never, never been achieved before. - Thomas Zacharia is the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a lab sponsor by the US Department of Energy. He's worked on over a dozen supercomputers in the US, and now leads the team that oversees the operation of Frontier. - US has been a leader in supercomputing for a long, long time. - [Narrator] Since the 1960s, US supercomputers have mostly dominated the field until China joined the race. - China really started dealing with high performance computers in a serious way back in 2001. - Jack Dongarra is a computer scientist based in the US and he's one of the founders of the TOP500 project. He's been closely watching China since it made its debut on the list in 2001. - [Jack] It's quite a change over a very short period of time, roughly 20 years, going from nothing to being dominant. - [Narrator] China hasn't revealed how much it's invested in supercomputing, but since 2006 Beijing has put it into the country's five-year plan, which is a blueprint for China's economic development. Today the country has more supercomputers on the TOP500 list than the US, but this year Chinese researchers didn't submit Tianhe-3 results. And some computer scientists say given how quickly Chinese machines have improved, Tianhe-3 may be as fast as Frontier, reaching the speed of a quintillion calculations per second. Scientists call this exascale performance. And to do that both the US and China started with this part. - A compute node is fundamentally the building block of a supercomputer. - [Narrator] An individual compute node is basically like your personal computer and take Frontier as an example. It mainly has two sets of chips. The central processing units or CPUs are the heart of the machine that carries out instructions and accelerators help boost the performance of the CPUs. - So you can imagine supercomputer as stacking up a whole bunch of those individual computers with a very, very fast network. So this is what a Frontier cabinet looks like. Frontier has got 74 cabinets. Each cabinet's about 8,000 pounds. It has 9,408 nodes. The nodes are connected to everyone, each other and can transfer information very fast. - [Narrator] Tianhe-3 also has cabinets with compute nodes but China hasn't disclosed the size of its machine. Some computer scientists say that based on state media footage and presentations by Tianhe-3's researchers, the machine may have a hundred cabinets and more than 50,000 nodes. But what really differentiates these two massive supercomputers are the tiny chips inside, because they're key to deciding the speed and computing capabilities. And that's an area where the US has an advantage over China. American scientists have access to some of the most cutting-edge technologies from semiconductor designers and producers at home. And Frontier's two chips come from one of the leading American semiconductor developers Advanced Micro Devices. Zacharia says the company has worked closely with the lab to design these chips. And that partnership has helped Frontier officially become the first exascale machine. - These are the latest in their evolution. They are designed and manufactured processors specifically with a view to building the supercomputer and delivering the performance that is needed. - [Narrator] China on the other hand has not had a home field advantage with chips. It used to rely on American companies like Intel and Nvidia but that became impossible in 2015 when the US barred its semiconductor makers from selling to Chinese institutions that develop supercomputers, including the one that builds Tianhe-3. - So the Tianhe people who were planning to build the next machine decided that they needed to, because they couldn't use Western parts they had to design their own chips. - [Narrator] China's National Supercomputer Center didn't respond to a request for comment about the performance and chip design of Tianhe-3. But ultimately building these supercomputers isn't just about achieving fast speed. - It goes back to science and doing the best science. So countries that have the fastest supercomputers can carry out simulations, which have greater fidelity and they can get results back much quicker. - [Narrator] For example, getting those results quickly was critical during the pandemic. Frontier was deployed to analyze 11 million genomes to better distinguish and predict variants. - It has given us clues to develop the next generation of vaccines, the next generation of therapeutics, to not only treat and prevent COVID, but also for other kind of ailments. - [Narrator] And to better solve some of the world's most pressing challenges, the lab is awarding scientists from around the world time to use Frontier based on the merit of their research and ensuring they're required to publish their findings. - It's an important part of doing science is exchanging information. We express our ideas and show one choice is better than another. And through that exchange we hopefully end up with a better situation. - [Narrator] China has also said it welcomes scientists from other countries to run research on Tianhe-3, but so far the machine has only been used by institutions backed by the Chinese government, like the country's top research group the Chinese Academy of Sciences. - The annoying thing is that we don't hear much about these computers. In the west it's a problem, I would say. I'm waiting for the time that we can have more interchanges. - [Narrator] Until then, this segregation of research could slow down progress even as both the US and China are united in finding ways to accelerate their supercomputers. (upbeat music)

Channel: The Wall Street Journal

Views: 205,822

Keywords: us vs china, supercomputers, supercpu, super cpu, computers, china, frontier supercomputer, tianhe, tianhe 3, tianhe 3 supercomputer, supercomputer build, supercomputer tech, supercomputer design, computer design, exascale computing, exascale, exascale supercomputer, exascale china, fastest computer, fastest computer 2022, fastest computer in the world, fastest computer build, supercomputing, chinese computer, frontier vs tianhe 3, computer science, amd, intel, nvidia, tech news, news

Id: _u4nGI3Ctr8

Length: 6min 36sec (396 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022