HPC

Use of Arm cores and Linux mean Beijing hasn’t broken away from the world

The TOP500 list of Earth’s mightiest supercomputers has a new leader: the 2.198 Exaflop/s LineShine machine housed at the National Supercomputer Center (NSC) in Shenzhen, which took the top spot without using any kit from Nvidia, Intel, or AMD.

Which is not to say that LineShine is an entirely Chinese creation. As explained in a pre-press paper, the machine’s LX2 processors are a local effort but use Armv9 designs – so chalk up a win for Blighty, the home of Arm. The machine also runs KylinOS – a Linux distribution that features contributions from around the world.

The paper reveals that LineShine comprises 20,480 computing nodes, and that each LX2 processor “integrates two compute dies (304 cores total) and eight on-package HBM stacks (32 GB, 4 TB/s aggregate bandwidth).”

“Each compute die contains 152 cores and 128 GB of off-package DDR memory organized into four NUMA domains,” the paper adds. “A dedicated SDMA engine handles data movement between DDR and HBM. The LX2 supports FP64/FP32/FP16/INT8 via SME and SVE units, delivering up to 60.3/120.6 TFLOPS in FP64/FP32. Nodes are interconnected via the LingQi high-speed network with a dual-plane multi-rail fat-tree topology, offering 1.6 Tb/s bandwidth per node.”

That network is also a Chinese creation, from the minds at Hangzhou LingQi Technology Co.

LineShine became the first system on the TOP500 to exceed two exaflops of sustained double-precision performance using CPUs only and the curators of the list think it could do better in future tests, because this time around it reached about 80 percent of its 2.736 Exaflop/s theoretical peak in tests conducted in preparation for this iteration of the TOP500 list.

News that LineShine topped the supercomputing charts comes as China’s government increasingly steers local organizations towards buying made-in-China tech. Beijing wants to decrease dependency on foreign products, because China has gone all-in on AI and other technologies to boost economic growth and enhance the capabilities of its military.

China’s Communist Party understands that reliance on imports can stymie those ambitions, with the USA’s ban on GPU sales to the Middle Kingdom offering ample evidence of the need to control tech supply chains. And now Beijing can point to its policies producing the most powerful single computer on the planet.

It’s conceivable that China could do even better in the future, as its GPU industry is nascent and currently producing products whose performance trails Nvidia and AMD by four or five years.

Those two paragons of US computing power, along with Intel, dominate this version of the TOP500 list – as has been the case for years. China is therefore on the march, but is a long way from global dominance.

Our sibling site The Next Platform has extensive analysis of the TOP500 list here. ®