Focus
World's fastest computer brings incalculable benefits
By Zhou Wa (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-08 08:00
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Making the machine
Seymour Cray, the so-called "father of supercomputing", designed the first high-powered machines in the early 1960s while working for the Control Data Corporation. A decade later, he left to start his own business, Cray Research, which has dominated the field ever since.
Although smaller competitors have challenged for a share of the market, most disappeared without a trace when the market crashed in the mid-1990s. Today, supercomputers are typically produced by Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
Technicians at Chinese Academy of Sciences' institute of computing technology (ITC) built the nation's first computer in 1958, two years after the unveiling of China's first national plan on scientific and technological development (1956-1967).
However, development hit a hurdle during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), when the "distance between the world and us was enlarged again", said Li Guojie, director of the ITC.
In 1978, then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping chose NUDT as one of the major institutions to develop China's own supercomputer and, five years later, the college produced its first supercomputer. It could perform 100 million calculations a second.
Central authorities made research into the national environment for high performance computing, a part of the 863 Program, a State-sponsored development initiative, in the 9th Five-Year Plan (1996-2000), later including related software.
Supercomputing made the headlines in 2007, when Dawning, makers of the Nebulae, helped China National Petroleum Corporation discover 100 million tons of oil reserves underneath Nanpu in Hebei province.
The next target for the Tianhe-1A team is to build a machine that can perform tens of petaflops per second, as well developing new CPUs and GPUs.
Although the supercomputer uses the FT-1000 (a CPU developed by NUDT), it largely runs on the 14,336 CPUs made by Intel, the US chipmakers, and 7,186 GPUs from Nvidia, also based in the US. In other words, Tianhe-1A relies on US firms.
"Perhaps future generations of the FT-1000 can be used as a replacement for the Intel part of the system," Jack Dongarra, a supercomputing expert who compiles the Top500 list, told China Daily through e-mail.
