China is said to have 3 secret exascale supercomputers

Supercomputers are usually used in… Top500 included. Companies, educational institutions and scientific institutes compete to see who is the fastest. After all, this is not just a good advertisement for the manufacturer of the components used: it is also prestigious for the country to be at the top of this rating of the fastest supercomputers.

It seems that China, which usually likes to brag about the achievements of its researchers, is no longer interested in this supercomputer race. It seems that there is already 3 exascale supercomputers is on – and the Western world has not been told anything about it.

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So far there is only one exascale supercomputer

It is considered an exascale computer at least One trillion calculations per second FLOPs can be achieved using 64-bit (FP64). Officially, there is currently only one supercomputer in the Top500 that is considered an exascale: border From the United States of America.

Jack DongaraOne of the Top500 founders posits that China already has 3 exascale in operation. Ambient light And Tianhe-3 It should have been running since 2021. With Sojun China’s third exascale is said to be operational this year.

“China is known to have these computers and they have been in use for a while,” Dongara told the South China Morning Post. No benchmarks will be provided, but the community can piece together a rough idea of ​​what exascale supercomputers can do based on research conducted and published using them.

Perhaps fear of further trade restrictions

It has boundaries 1,194 Exaflops performance. So was Sojun 2-ExaFLOPs system Planned. The project has been postponed several times due to the US trade embargo against Chinese companies. The original plan was to use Epyc processors under license from the American company AMD to use. According to a November 2022 report, AMD Epyc 9004 processors are said to have been installed in Sugon despite the trade ban.

It is therefore suspected that China is deliberately not sending benchmarks and details about exascales to the Top500. The idea is to keep secret how much American technology is in it, if not at the moment Impose a stricter trade ban To provoke.

What contradicts this theory is that OceanLight and Tianhe-3 do not require American technology. OceanLight must use self-designed chips. The Tianhe-3 has FeiTeng processors based on the ARM architecture, with a mix of Chinese array chips.

2 exascales in the European Union

The next Top500 update will be in November. With the American system Aurora An exascale that exceeds 2 ExaFLOPs of performance must be added.

The exascale is located at the German research center Jülich Jupiter. It is not known whether he will be included in the November issue of Top500 magazine. in France The second EU exascale is currently being built. However, this should not be fully operational until 2025.