East vs. West: China builds petaflop homegrown supercomputer

Drawing of a battle between the ruling oligarchs in the West and developing countries hordes of Asia, China has unveiled a new supercomputer that fully uses homegrown processors - 8,704 of them, to be exact. The computer is called Sunway BLUELIGHT MPP and has a maximum output of just over one petaflop - or about the 15th fastest supercomputer in the world.

Sunway user ShenWei SW-March 1600, a 16-core, 64-bit MIPS-compatible (RISC) CPU. The process is used to make chips is not known, but it's probably 65 or 45nm, a couple of generations behind Intel's latest and greatest. Each of the cores running at 1.1GHz 139,264, the total system memory and 150TB of storage 2PB, and of course the water-cooled. The whole system takes only nine racks, which is very small for a supercomputer of this magnitude. ShenWei chips are based on Loongson / Godson architecture that China - as in the country - has been working steadily since 2001. It is assumed that Loongson family of processors, including ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, was created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU.

Now there are two reasons for Sunway is significant. The first, with a maximum draw of around one megawatt, it is incredibly power efficient. His contemporaries at the top of the charts supercomputer with at least two megawatts, and the fastest supercomputer in the U.S., Jaguar, pulls no less than seven megawatts. Secondly, this is the first major high-power computing (HPC) system in the world that does not use Intel or AMD processors. So you think it's just coincidence, think again: China has repeatedly said he wants to break its dependence on American / Western high-tech - and now supercomputers to add to its growing list of ( mostly reverse-engineered) successes.

The low power consumption is unlikely to haunt western computer too long - it's probably just a combination of RISC architecture and the very low clock speed - but insisted China's independent of the U.S. will be problematic. There is almost no doubt that China's gross domestic product will eventually surpass the U.S. - it's just a matter of when. It's just an economy of scale: There is only one billion people in the Western world and three billion in Brazil, India, Russia and China (BRIC). Very soon, perhaps in 2020, the only edge that the U.S. will have on research and innovation - suggests and today's announcement of Sunway supercomputer that America could not be much of an advantage as it would hope.