Have you ever seen a computer as big as a house?

I believe that everyone has heard of the high-end term "supercomputer" in daily life, and many media are also continuously tracking and reporting on the research results of my country's supercomputers. How powerful is my country in the field of supercomputers?

From the TOP500 list of world supercomputers published in the past three years from 2020 to 2022, Japan's "Fugaku" supercomputer has won three consecutive championships, followed by the second and third places held by the US supercomputers "Summit" and "Sierra", my country's "Sunway TaihuLight" supercomputer ranked fourth, and another Chinese supercomputer "Tianhe-2" ranked seventh. From 2010 to 2015, my country's "Tianhe-1" and "Tianhe-2" won six consecutive championships in the world's top 500 supercomputers list, and "Sunway TaihuLight" topped the world supercomputer rankings in 2016 and 2017.

Source: Modern Express

So, what is a supercomputer? In what fields can supercomputers be used? What bottlenecks and challenges does my country face in the field of supercomputers?

1. What is a supercomputer?

A supercomputer is a very large electronic computer. Functionally, it is no different from an ordinary computer. It inputs data and then gives calculation results. The components of the two are also basically the same.

However, in terms of efficiency and scale, supercomputers far exceed ordinary computers, with super-fast data processing speeds and super-large data storage space.

Take the "Shenwei TaihuLight", which is my country's first chip made with domestically produced chips, for example. It has a total of 40,960 Shenwei 26010 multi-core processors. Although a single processor is only the size of a camera SD memory card, it contains huge computing power. The peak performance of the processor is 12.54 kilowatts per second and the sustained performance is 9.3 kilowatts per second (1 kilowatt is 100 billion).

It is precisely because of the large number of components that supercomputers occupy a large area. For example, the "Sunway Taihu Light" covers an area of ​​nearly 1,000 square meters and consists of 40 computing cabinets and 8 network cabinets. Each cabinet contains 1,024 processors. From the outside, a supercomputer occupies about the same space as a house or even a building. The power consumption of a supercomputer is also in the thousands of kilowatts. Common personal computers only consume a few hundred watts. The energy consumption of a supercomputer is equivalent to that of 100,000 personal computers. To give a more intuitive example, the energy consumption of a supercomputer is equivalent to that of a high-speed train traveling at a speed of 350 kilometers per hour.

Source: unsplash

The storage space of supercomputers is also huge. For example, my country's supercomputer "Tianhe-2" consists of 170 cabinets, including 24 storage cabinets, with a total memory capacity of 1200T and a total storage capacity of up to 11PB (1PB is about 1.04 million GB).

Source: Nanfang Net

2. Application of supercomputers

Supercomputers are used in many aspects of military and civilian fields. Supercomputers can be used to accelerate any situation that requires large-scale numerical simulation calculations and large-scale data analysis. Supercomputers can solve many challenging problems, such as nuclear test simulation, oil exploration, weather forecasting, agricultural breeding, medical services, new drug development, animation rendering, material design, financial computing, etc.

Source: CCTV.com

An international team of cosmic neutrino numerical simulations, led by Chinese scientists, has successfully completed a numerical simulation of cosmic neutrinos and dark matter with 30 trillion particles on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer system, revealing the long evolution process of the universe from 16 million years after the Big Bang to the present 13.7 billion years.

Supercomputers have brought new research methods to many research fields. Virtual experiments and even virtual reality on supercomputers can be used to assist or replace real experiments.

In the military industry, computer-simulated nuclear explosions have completely replaced nuclear experiments. When developing aircraft, supercomputers are used to complete aerodynamic and structural design. The powerful computing power of supercomputers has enabled virtual experiments to break through the limits of theoretical and experimental research, speeding up the research process while significantly reducing costs. Supercomputers are an important fulcrum in both national defense and science and technology, so it is not an exaggeration to call them "national heavy weapons."

With the continuous progress of science and technology, supercomputers that have evolved into compact information processing devices have been integrated into all aspects of production and life, building a network of cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and smart devices. In the economic and social fields, data mining can analyze people's consumption habits, and the research results obtained can improve operational efficiency.

The widespread existence of supercomputing and its closely related technologies and emerging industries such as smart manufacturing, virtual reality, etc. will provide people with a perspective where it is difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction, bringing more creative possibilities for the future.

3. Challenges facing supercomputers

Since the 1990s, supercomputers have been upgraded with the rapid development of commodity general-purpose processors. Since 2000, the number of supercomputers built with commodity general-purpose hardware has reached more than 90% of the total number of supercomputers. However, these machines developed according to the "commodity hardware-software-application" process have also encountered new challenges.

First, commercial general-purpose software and hardware cannot deal with computationally difficult problems in professional fields in a very targeted manner, resulting in supercomputers being unable to fully utilize their computing power when dealing with these problems. At the same time, the energy consumption of supercomputers continues to increase, but the performance-to-energy ratio (energy consumption ratio) has not increased significantly. In addition, the high operating costs of supercomputers are also one of the challenges that hinder their wider application.

Source: unsplash

It is foreseeable that the world's supercomputer technology is still in the midst of a storm of innovation. As Chinese scientists continue to increase research and development of hardware and software, my country's supercomputer technology will continue to advance steadily and create new results.