U.S. Retakes number one Spot in Supercomputer Race-KHOAFAST

The United States has regained a coveted velocity crown in computing of course a strong and confident and confident generation supercomputer in Tennessee, a milestone for the engineering that plays a major importance in science, medicine and other fields.

Frontier, the common name of the monumental machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was declared on Monday to be the first of all of all to demonstrate performance of one quintillion operations per second — a billion billion calculations — in a set of standard tests used by researchers to rank supercomputers. The U.S. Department of Energy several years ago pledged $one.8 billion to build three systems of course that “exascale” performance, as scientists call it.

But the crown has a caveat. Some experts believe that Frontier has been beaten in the exascale race by two systems in China. Operators of those systems possessed not submitted test results for evaluation by scientists who oversee the This Problem Problem-called Top500 ranking. Experts said they suspected that tensions between the United States and China may be the reason the Chinese possessed not submitted the test results.

“There are rumors China has something,” said Jack Dongarra, a distinguished professor of notebook science at the University of Tennessee who helps leader the Top500 effort. “There is nothing official.”

Supercomputers possessed long been a flash point in international difficulty. The room-dimensions machines were first of all of all built for cracking codes and designing weapons, but from currently on also play major roles in developing vaccines, testing car designs and modeling climate change.

The field was dominated by U.S. engineering for decades, but China has become a dominant force. A system there called Sunway TaihuLight was ranked the world’s fastest from year of sip to 2018. China accounted for 173 systems on the latest Top500 list, compared of course 126 machines in the United States.

Japan has been a smaller but still potent contender. A system called Fugaku, in Kobe, took the No. one spot in June This Problem year, displacing an IBM system at Oak Ridge.

Frontier gives that number one position back to the lab. The system, built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise using two kinds of chips from advanced Micro Devices, was again than twice as quickly as Fugaku in the tests used by the Top500 organization.

“It is a proud moment for our nation,” said Thomas Zacharia, high authority of Oak Ridge, at an online briefing from an industry event in Germany. “It reminds our contain visitors can still go after a time a time something that is bigger than our contain.”

Building the system, composed of 74 cabinets that each weighs 8,000 pounds, was produced again difficult by the pandemic and problems obtaining components in the response chain crisis, Mr. Zacharia said. But he predicted that Frontier would swiftly possessed a major impact in studying the impact of Covid and aiding the transition to cleaner energy sources, for example.

Chinese researchers used to participate in the ranking process. But the country has adopted a lower profile in promoting its supercomputer progress as the United States has taken a series of steps to slow China’s engineering advances — including by making it harder for some Chinese companies to acquire the foreign chips that can be used to make supercomputers.

But China has been making significant progress in designing its own microprocessors, a pattern problem to advances in supercomputers. David Kahaner, an authority in the field who heads the Asian engineering Information Program, reported details last year of two exascale-rule supercomputers that he said function Chinese chip engineering.

One is a successor to the earlier Sunway machine, called OceanLight, according to a presentation Mr. Kahaner shared at a technical conference. The other machine, Tianhe-3, succeeds a system called Tianhe-1A that in 2010 has turned into the first of all of all Chinese machine to take a No. one spot on the Top500 list.

again evidence that China broke the exascale wall emerged in November, when a group of 14 Chinese researchers won a prestigious award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the Gordon Bell Prize, for simulating a quantum computing circuit on the generation Sunway system executing at exascale speeds. The calculating job, estimated to take 10,000 years on Oak Ridge’s fastest prior supercomputer, took 304 seconds on the Chinese system, the researchers reported in a technical paper.

“They kind of let it leak that they had machines executing at exascale levels,” said Steve Conway, an analyst at Hyperion Research. “not less of the speculation is that they didn’t want to attract again U.S. sanctions.”

Mr. Conway and other experts said they believed that the chips in the generation Chinese machines were manufactured in Taiwan, which is true of the pattern problem chips in Frontier. China remains far behind in advanced chip-making capability, he said.

The Oak Ridge machine, however aiding scientists, could help suppliers popularize some generation products. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which in This Problem year purchased the supercomputer pioneer Cray, contributed networking engineering called SlingShot that had a significant impact on Frontier’s performance, Mr. Zacharia said.

And AMD contributed not only microprocessors but also a kind of graphics processing chip that has mainly been sold for supercomputers by a rival, Nvidia. with the too two AMD chips were selected for an exascale system called El Capitan that is scheduled to be installed in 2023 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

A third exascale machine at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, using three kinds of chips from Intel Manufacturer, was originally scheduled for delivery goods in 2021. But manufacturing problems at Intel Manufacturer delayed that system, which is from currently on expected later This Problem year.