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Employees are reflected on glass as they work in front of supercomputers at The National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, Shandong province, China, 17 October 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE

China ‘has decided not to fan the flames on supercomputing rivalry’ amid US tensions

  • According to the Top500 list published last week, the US has retained its top position as the producer of the fastest supercomputers in the world

China chose not to confront the US directly in the field of supercomputing before the Trump administration’s recent decision to add five Chinese high-performance computing companies to its trade blacklist, according to people familiar with the matter.

Chinese decision makers decided to withhold the country’s newest Shuguang supercomputers from the latest supercomputing contest, even though they operate more than 50 per cent faster than the best current US machines, as China does not want to fan the flames of existing trade tensions, said the sources, who declined to be named as the information is private.

According to the Top500 list published last week, the US has retained its top position as the producer of the fastest supercomputers in the world. China, which has not introduced any new machines in recent months, is in second place. The Top500 list is released twice a year, once in June and again in November.

The newest Shuguang supercomputers, currently located at the computer network information Centre of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing, are capable of performing more than 200 petaflops. A petaflop refers to one quadrillion (or a million billion) calculations per second.

The Shuguang supercomputers’ abilities far exceed the US leaders in the chart, Summit and Sierra, two IBM-built supercomputers that delivered a record 148.6 petaflops and 94.6 petaflops in the June contest respectively, said the people.

“China is finding itself with no choice but to create its own alternatives to US technology,” said Paul Haswell, a partner who advises technology companies at international law firm Pinsent Masons.

“This inevitably takes time, and will have a corresponding impact on China’s development in all fields requiring state-of-the-art supercomputing tech.”

However, China’s strategic concession to play a low-key game on supercomputing rivalry did not stop the US Commerce Department last Friday from adding five Chinese top supercomputing developers to its Entity List, which effectively bars them from purchasing American technology.

Supercomputers have become an emblem of technological might, and apart from bragging rights, they can be applied to sensitive areas such as nuclear weapons development, encryption and missile defence, among others.

They are also used for weather prediction, modelling ocean currents, in energy technology and for simulating nuclear explosions. Demand for supercomputing in commercial applications is also on the rise, driven by developments in artificial intelligence.

The US Commerce Department said it was adding Sugon, the Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, Higon, Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit and Chengdu Haiguang Microelectronics Technology – along with numerous aliases of the five entities – to the list over concerns about military applications of the supercomputers they are developing.

The move comes ahead of US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting during the G20 summit in Japan this week, and as China and the US vie to produce the first exascale computer, a next-generation machine capable of one quintillion – or a billion billion – calculations a second.

In 2015, US President Barack Obama signed an executive order to authorise the creation of the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) to accelerate the development of technologies for exascale supercomputers and to fund research into post-semiconductor-based computing.

China plans massive computer investment to knock US from top spot

China began to build supercomputers without US semiconductors after the Obama administration banned the sale of high-end Intel, Nvidia and AMD chips for Chinese supercomputers in 2015.

The US decision to block the five Chinese supercomputing companies will not have a “decisive impact” as domestic players, according to a report on Tuesday by the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

That’s because they are already capable of producing key components, including CPUs for the supercomputers, unassisted, the report said.

Sugon, officially known as Dawning Information Industry Co, is a leading Chinese company in the field of high-performance computing (HPC), servers, storage, cloud-computing and big data, and is also a key developer of the Shuguang supercomputers.

Backed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sugon was also the first company to bring China into the global top 3 for supercomputing, and held pole position in China’s Top 100 rankings for HPC for eight consecutive years, from 2009 to 2016, according to its website.

China is planning multibillion-dollar investments to upgrade its supercomputer infrastructure to regain leadership after the US took top spot for the fastest supercomputer in 2018, ending China’s five-year dominance, the South China Morning Post reported in March, citing people familiar with the matter.

The US has its Exascale Computing Project, which has the goal of launching an exascale computing ecosystem by 2021.

But in China, the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, the National Supercomputing Centre of Tianjin and the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen are expected to complete their upgrade to exascale computing machines in 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively, as part of China’s drive for “continuous leadership” in the field, the Post also reported in March.

Additional reporting by Bien Perez

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