China's Sunway supercomputer on a par with the world's most powerful

Chinese scientists say a new supercomputer is so fast it has successfully run an artificial intelligence model as sophisticated as a human brain. The achievement puts the Newest Generation Sunway supercomputer on a par with Frontier, the latest machine built by the U.S. Department of Energy, which earlier this month was named the world’s most powerful. The Chinese team used the Sunway to train an AI model with 174 trillion parameters, rivaling the number of synapses in the brain. It could be used for the development of autonomous vehicles and facial recognition, as well as natural language processing, computer vision, life sciences and chemistry. The results were presented at a virtual meeting of Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming 2022, an international conference hosted by the U.S.-based Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in April.

The latest Sunway has a speed of a billion billion operations per second, expressed as 5.3 floating-point operations per second (exaflops), and more than 37 million CPU cores – four times as many as Frontier. The Sunway, with nine petabytes of memory – equivalent to more than two million DVD-quality movies – and 96,000 semi-independent computer systems called nodes, resembled a powerful human brain, they said. Communication between the nodes at speeds of more than 23 petabytes per second simulates a change of mind. One researcher said the machine’s parallel computing ability mimicked human thinking “like eating while watching television”. By combining critical technologies such as hardware-specific intra-node optimization and hybrid parallel strategies at a scale never seen before, the scientists said they had achieved a “decent performance” from the unprecedented “brain-scale” AI model.

Like its predecessor the Sunway TaihuLight, the new supercomputer uses home-designed chips with unique features such as energy-saving and broad communication bandwidth. The TaihuLight, developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, was number one on the Top 500 list of supercomputers from 2016 to 2018, before China stopped providing data to the Top 500. China has been developing three exascale supercomputers similar to the Sunway since 2016, the South China Morning Post reports.