Galaxy-I is 40 years old! Inheritance and transcendence, the glorious road of China's supercomputer!

On December 22, 1983, my country's self-developed Galaxy-I supercomputer was unveiled at the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, Hunan. This is a super equipment with an arc-shaped columnar appearance, about 2.2 meters high and 2.3 meters in diameter. With a surging computing power of more than 100 million floating-point operations per second, it opened the glorious development history of China's supercomputers for 40 years.

China's first "Galaxy" supercomputer, which can perform more than 100 million operations per second, was successfully developed by the Computer Research Institute of the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha. (Source: Xinhua News Agency)

01National computing power is subject to human control

Giant computers are also commonly called supercomputers. Their computing speed and storage capacity exceed those of ordinary computers by several orders of magnitude, and they can quickly complete large-scale complex calculations that other computers are unable to handle . From oil exploration and weather forecasting to engine simulation, spacecraft measurement and control, and nuclear test simulations that are critical to national defense security ...supercomputers can play an irreplaceable role in all scientific research fields that require intensive computing and massive data processing. It is no exaggeration to say that the powerful computing power represented by supercomputers constitutes part of a country's scientific research and even comprehensive national strength .

In the 1960s and 1970s, supercomputing technology in the United States, Japan and other countries developed rapidly. In 1976, the American Cray-1 became the world's first billion-times supercomputer, and was immediately used for the research and development of new nuclear weapons in the United States. During this period, China suffered from the lack of high-performance computers, and scientific research, economic development and national defense construction were seriously restricted by insufficient computing power . Precious oil exploration data had to be sent abroad for processing, which was expensive, time-consuming and prone to leaks. After finally buying a supercomputer from the United States, Chinese experts had no right to enter the control room, and all calculations had to be performed by foreign personnel.

How can the country's computing power be controlled by others for a long time? In May 1978, China's National Defense Science and Technology Commission held a supercomputer program demonstration and cooperation meeting and decided to spend about six years and 200 million yuan to develop a supercomputer that can perform 100 million operations per second. The Computer Research Institute of the National University of Defense Technology undertook the glorious and arduous development task, and computer expert Ci Yungui served as the chief designer and technical commander, starting the first leap from scratch to the development of my country's supercomputers.

02A powerful weapon that has been tempered through thousands of trials

The research and development task of the exascale computer was named "Project 785" after the date of the decision-making meeting. During several months of extensive research, the research and development team obtained the technical information of the American Cray-1 computer and believed that its design concept and architecture were relatively advanced and unique. Chief Designer Ci Yungui drew on the advanced structure of Cray-1 to redesign the overall design. In the end, the 785 computer adopted a dual-vector array architecture scheme, striving to develop an exascale computer that is both in line with national conditions and in line with international mainstream .

From the start of the project in May 1978 to the passing of national appraisal in December 1983, the development of the 785 computer went through six stages. From the overall plan demonstration and project preparation, model machine development, host production, giant machine hardware system debugging, to the software system development and joint debugging throughout the entire project process, to the trial calculation and national technical assessment and appraisal to verify the success of the project, the scientific research personnel represented by Professor Ci Yungui worked hard for 5 years and completed the development task ahead of schedule with only 1/5 of the original planned funds . The new 785 computer also had a resounding name : Galaxy-I .

In order to verify whether the goals of the "785" project were fully achieved, Chinese experts conducted extremely strict technical assessments on the first Galaxy-I supercomputer. In June and September 1982, Galaxy-I first underwent a systematic assessment by the user unit. In December 1983, the National Defense Science and Technology Commission organized a national appraisal meeting, and 7 expert groups conducted a more comprehensive technical appraisal of Galaxy-I. Faced with a series of almost harsh technical assessments, the Galaxy-I supercomputer showed surprisingly stable and reliable:

( 1 ) The hardware system is well designed and of excellent quality, with no cold solder joints among the more than 2 million solder joints;

( 2 ) Multiple test results show that the hardware vector operation speed reaches more than 100 million times per second;

( 3 ) 26 complex correctness calculation questions, the numbers calculated three times are exactly the same, and the correctness and accuracy of the results fully meet the requirements;

( 4 ) The system ran stably and continuously for 150 hours, far exceeding the design requirement of 24 hours of mean failure-free time...

On December 22, 1983, the Galaxy-I supercomputer successfully passed the national appraisal, and the appraisal report confirmed that "the Galaxy computer is the first billion-times electronic computer system independently developed by China. " The well-refined Galaxy-I supercomputer allowed China to break the technological monopoly of the United States, Japan and other countries, and became one of the few countries capable of developing billion-times supercomputers.

03The ever-shining “Galaxy” spirit

After the successful development, my country has produced three Galaxy-I supercomputers. One stayed in the Computer Research Institute of the National University of Defense Technology, serving economic construction and national defense applications; one went to the Research Institute of the Petroleum Ministry's Geophysical Exploration Bureau in Zhuo County, Hebei Province, providing powerful computing power for seismic data processing in oil exploration; and another became the mainframe of the Southwest Computing Center in Mianyang, Sichuan, becoming a super "model worker" with more than 8,000 machine hours of operation per year, making great contributions to engineering physics scientific computing and aerospace project computing.

The development and application of the Galaxy-I supercomputer fully demonstrated the great value and broad prospects of the supercomputer industry. The "Galaxy Spirit" of "caring for the motherland, working in unity and cooperation, aiming for the top, and fighting bravely", as well as the technology and experience accumulated in the development of the Galaxy-I supercomputer, have become a powerful driving force for Chinese computer researchers, inspiring them to work tirelessly to catch up with the world's advanced level. The Galaxy-II billion-times supercomputer and the Galaxy-III exascale supercomputer were successfully developed in 1992 and 1997 respectively.

"Galaxy-II" supercomputer (Source: Screenshot of the paper)

The "Galaxy" and "Tianhe" series of the National University of Defense Technology, the "Shenteng" series of Lenovo Group, the "Shuguang" series of Inspur, the "Shenwei" series of the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center... Since the 1990s, China's supercomputer camp has grown stronger, and new domestic supercomputers have continuously challenged the world's advanced level.

In November 2010, China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer, with its groundbreaking CPU+GPU heterogeneous fusion architecture, achieved a peak computing speed of 4700 trillion times and a sustained computing speed of 25.66 trillion times, becoming the fastest supercomputer in the world, making China's supercomputers historically reach the top of the world .

On October 29, 2009, the Tianhe-1 supercomputer with a peak performance of 12.06 trillion times per second was successfully developed by the National University of Defense Technology. my country became the second country in the world that can develop a petaflop supercomputer. The picture shows the Tianhe-1 petaflop supercomputer system. (Source: Xinhua News Agency)

Researchers are conducting system performance tests on the Tianhe-1 supercomputer (Source: Xinhua News Agency)

From 2016 to 2017, the Sunway TaihuLight, which was equipped with 40,960 domestic processors, held the title of the world's fastest supercomputer for two consecutive years .

Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer (Source: Xinhua News Agency)

Monitoring panel of the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer (Source: Xinhua News Agency)

The switch network cable of the "Sunway TaihuLight" supercomputer (Source: Xinhua News Agency)

The focus of the current world competition in supercomputing technology is the E-class supercomputer that can perform one hundred billion operations per second (ExaFLOPS). China's "Tianhe-3" and "Shenwei Ocean Light" are both strong competitors for the title of E-class supercomputer.

"Tianhe-3" exascale prototype (Source: Xinhua News Agency)

In the blink of an eye, 40 years have passed. China, which started with the difficult development of the Galaxy-I supercomputer, has become a powerful player in the world in the field of supercomputing technology. The "Galaxy Spirit" has also become the common historical memory and spiritual wealth of the Chinese nation, just like the "Two Bombs and One Satellite Spirit".

Author: Qin Yu, senior engineer of computer information system management, winner of the first prize in the article category of the 2017 "Top Ten New Science Popularization Makers" competition

Produced by: Science Popularization China

Produced by: China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., China Science and Technology Publishing House (Beijing) Digital Media Co., Ltd.