Home-made CPUs again set off an upsurge

Last week, the Jinan Center, another supercomputer center in China, was formally launched. The Shenwei Blu-ray high-performance computer used by the company became the first petascale computer system built entirely using domestic CPUs and system software. Its significance is not significant. In other words, China became the third country after the United States and Japan to use its own CPU to build petascale secondary supercomputers. When referring to self-developed domestic CPUs, many people's first reaction will be "Godson." What is the Shenwei Blu-ray high-performance computer and what is the intrinsic power of the Shenwei 1600A processor with its own domestic intellectual property?

In 2011, this week's China High-Performance Computer Performance TOP100 Ranking was held in Jinan, Shandong Province: the first place was installed in Tianhe-1A, the national supercomputer center in Tianjin, and the second place was installed in the National Supercomputer Jinan Center. Shenwei Blu-ray; third place, installed in the Tianhe-1A-HN of the National Supercomputer Hunan Center. Although not ranked first in China, Shenwei Blu-ray has an extraordinary significance. It is the first petascale supercomputing system built entirely using domestic CPUs.

On the Thursday in Jinan, news came that the fourth supercomputer center in China was formally listed as one of the three petascale supercomputing centers in China. The Shenwei Blu-ray high-performance computer it uses is developed by the National Parallel Computing Center. According to MPP trillion trillion architecture design, the processor uses 8704 16-core Shenwei 1600, the peak computing speed of 1100 trillion floating-point calculations per second, continuous computing capacity of 738 trillion times. Its biggest feature is that the core processor uses the domestic CPU Shenwei 1600 processor.

As early as in late September 2010, the news about the National Supercomputing Center Jinan Center and Shenwei Blu-ray was reported. According to media reports on September 28, 2010, Inspur undertook the project of Shandong Institute of Information and Communication Technology and started the construction of “Blue Light”. "The petascale supercomputer.

At that time, the Shandong Institute of Information and Communications Technology revealed that with the national "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" and "863 Program" major projects in the field of "high-performance computer and network service environment" in the information technology sector approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology, The Energy Computer System will also be located in the hospital. Through this project, Jinan will become the leading domestic supercomputing system R&D and application highland together with Shenzhen and Tianjin.

In early December of the same year, the Ministry of Science and Technology organized an expert review of Jinan’s “National Supercomputing Jinan Center Construction Program and Development and Implementation of Shenwei Blu-ray Petascale High-Performance Computer System” in Jinan. The meeting unanimously adopted the implementation of the program.

It is reported that the “National Supercomputing Jinan Center” is a national 863 major project approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the fourth national supercomputing center approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology after Tianjin, Shenzhen and Changsha. The computing center plans to invest a total of 600 million yuan, with a construction period of 2 years.

“Shenwei Blu-ray” is located in the service industrial cluster area of ​​Jinan High-tech Zone. The peak speed of this system exceeds petaflops per second and the storage capacity reaches the PB level. After the system is completed, it will be a high-performance computing, storage and display environment. As one of the supercomputing platforms. The project plans to invest 200 million yuan from the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the provincial government will invest 400 million yuan to build it.

Domestic CPU: Shenwei 1600

Among China’s three petascale supercomputer systems, “Shenwei Blu-ray” is not the best but it has an unusual meaning. It is the first petascale supercomputer in China with home-grown CPU. system.

Tianhe No.1, which ranks No.1 in domestic supercomputers, has tried trials of domestic CPUs. Tianhe No.1 has adopted the Feiteng-1000 processor developed by the National Defense University, but it is not completely adopted. The Shenwei Blu-ray is the use of domestic CPUs across the times.

As early as 2009, Academician Jin Yixuan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the director of the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center said that China is fully capable of adopting domestic CPU (central processing unit) chips and completing the development task of the country's petascale supercomputers in a short period of time. This Shenwei Blu-ray is exactly the proof of his prediction.

Among the three major series of domestic processors, the China National Science and Technology University's Feiteng series and the Godson series of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have all had unprecedented glory. This is the turn of the Shenwei series calculated in the south of the Yangtze River.

Shenwei 1600 processor is the third-generation processor of Shenwei series developed by Jiangnan Computing Institute. It is a project of cooperation between Jiangnan Institute of Computing and the State Key Laboratory of High-performance Servers and Storage Technology. On the official website of the State Key Laboratory of High-performance Servers and Storage Technologies, we can find out about the Shenwei SW-3 many-core processor project.

As the first petascale supercomputer system built entirely with China-made CPUs, it can be regarded as a milestone in the field of supercomputers in China. The successful construction of the Jinan Supercomputer Center (Shenwei Blu-ray Supercomputing System) achieved the autonomous and controllable goal of the core technology of the country's large-scale key information infrastructure. It is understood that Shenwei Blu-ray will mainly be used in some key subject areas such as marine science, new drug development, weather forecasting, financial analysis, industrial simulation, etc., and ensure the stable operation of applications.