Not everyone understands why we need some expensive supercomputers. Maybe it's a show-off and a waste of money? Let's try to figure it out …
A new Top-500 rating of the world's most powerful supercomputers has been published. This time the American car took first place, pushing the Chinese "colleague". IBM has launched the most powerful supercomputer, Summit, commissioned by the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The performance of his system was estimated at 200 petaflops (200 quadrillion operations per second). While China and the United States are fighting for "medals", Russian cars …
… are content with only a place in the eighth ten. Ilya Plekhanov talks about the computing race and the new possibilities of the world's largest countries with their powerful machines.
After the standard Linpack test, which captures the operating performance of a supercomputer, the real indicator of the American Summit was 122.3 petaflops, while the performance of the former champion, China's Sunway TaihuLight, was 93 petaflops. So the United States regained the palm in the most productive supercomputers, which it lost to China in 2013.
Processor Summit.
The new American Summit consists of 4,608 dual-processor IBM AC922 servers powered by 22-core IBM Power9 processors, each powered by 6 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Internal connections use a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network with 200 Gbps bandwidth per server. The supercomputer runs on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 operating system. MIT Technology Review reports that the Summit weighs more than a passenger airliner and occupies 2 tennis courts.
Even before the final completion of the system, the researchers ran computations against genomes, during which they recorded the Summit's performance of 1.88 exaflops. This is the first time in history that the 1 exaflops barrier has been broken, according to Thomas Zachariah, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In winter, China threatened to launch a computer with a performance of 1 exaflops by the end of this year, that is, a quintillion (10 to the 18th power) of operations per second, while the United States previously allocated $ 258 million to create a supercomputer with a performance of more than 1 exaflops by 2021. Development, as announced in 2017, is carried out by six American companies - Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Cray and AMD.
Supercomputer running sound:
Promotional video:
The symbol of the power of the country
The emergence of another supercomputer is a kind of prestigious milestone and an indicator of what the country can do, does it have the resources and skills, the budget from hundreds of millions of dollars to over a billion to create a supercomputer, is there energy capacity for power supply, engineering solutions for heat removal, do they have their own processors, qualified personnel and so on. US Energy Secretary Rick Perry commented on Summit's appearance:
It is the issue of national security that can be considered the key, since the United States is at least concerned about China's intention to become a leader in the field of artificial intelligence. After all, this means the use of AI in the military sphere.
The Chinese Sunway TaihuLight, which went in second place, was a breakthrough for China in creating its own computing and element base. The Sunway TaihuLight processors are based on the local ShenWei architecture developed by the Shanghai State High Performance IC Design Center. The system of inter-processor interconnection of nodes, known as the Sunway Network, was also developed in China. In addition, Sunway TaihuLight has its own implementation of the parallel programming software standard, the Linux-based SunWay Raise OS 2.0.5 operating system. That is, China was able to overcome its dependence on American elements and the imposed restrictions on the supply of high-tech products since 2015.
Sunway TaihuLight.
In Russia, in 2009, the Lomonosov supercomputer was installed at Moscow State University, which contains 6 654 computing nodes, more than 94 000 processor cores, and has a peak performance of 1.37 Pflops. The real performance of the system on the Linpack test is 674 teraflops, which allowed it to take 13th place in the list of Top500 most productive computers in the world in June 2011.
In March 2018, Moscow State University announced that the development was completed and trial operation of a new section of the Lomonosov-2 supercomputer with a peak performance of 1.8 Pflops began, which in the future will allow it to come close to the 5 Pflops boundary. The new supercomputer section is based on Intel Skylake multi-core processors and NVidia Pascal P100 GPUs with hardware support for the high-speed NVLink interface.
"Lomonosov".
In March, employees of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in the Moscow Region city of Dubna presented a new supercomputer "Govorun", which will be used to process data from the future heavy ion collider NICA. The Govorun's performance is 1 petaflops. The supercomputer is based on 72-core Intel Xeon Phi 7290 and Intel Xeon Gold 6154 processors.
Supercomputers appear in Russia, but not with such performance as to be included in the Top500 rating. In January of this year, Igor Chernykh, then acting head of the Center for Collective Use "Siberian Supercomputer Center" of the ICM & MG SB RAS, said:
According to Oleg Gorbachev, director for corporate communications of the RSK group of companies, the situation could be corrected by the national program:
Supercomputer tasks
A supercomputer is needed in order to work with a huge amount of data and variables - with information measured in exabytes (10 to the 18th power of bytes) and in yottabytes (10 to the 24th power of bytes). And it's not only about volumes, but also about speed. For example, calculations of meteorological conditions will turn out to be meaningless if they take longer than the onset of a particular weather phenomenon.
"Talker".
Another question is that difficulties arise not so much with the number of operations per second, but with the elaboration of those algorithms that require such speeds and such a number of processors. That is, the technical capabilities are improving, but they also need mathematical models, software filling - an understanding of how and what to count.
Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Applied Mathematics M. V. Keldysh Andrey Kuleshov explains what the specifics of using supercomputer technology are:
Therefore, Russian scientists believe that Russia's lag behind the United States and China in petaflops is not so terrible. The key to the efficient use of machines is a high mathematical level and a class of software specialists in Russia.
What are they doing now
For example, the Spanish supercomputer MareNostrum (as the ancient pagan Romans called the Mediterranean Sea) is located in the premises of the former Christian chapel of Torre Girona and is used for genetic engineering calculations, astrophysicists, creating new medicines and forecasting the weather.
But not everything is focused only on large-scale scientific research. Business is also actively using supercomputers. For example, Ford uses powerful cars in crash tests, where cars crash into an obstacle and a ton of parameters must be filmed, measured and analyzed. Using a supercomputer can reduce the number of real cars crashed and test costs by a third, saving millions of dollars.
Using supercomputers, DuPont has synthesized a new material that is non-flammable, corrosion-resistant and low-toxic. In one week, the necessary calculations were carried out on a supercomputer, for which in total they spent about $ 5 thousand. The study "the old fashioned way" would cost at least $ 50 thousand and three months of work.
Simulation of a crash test by a supercomputer taking into account the damage of all elements of the car.
Since 1990, the partner of the Wimbledon tournament in the field of technology is the American company IBM, which provides the organizers of the championship with the supercomputer Watson. With its help, social networks are analyzed in order to identify positive and negative moods of fans, provide commentators with any comparative data from the archives, and automate marketing and PR on the Internet.
The French company Total in oil exploration uses a supercomputer to analyze information about the subsoil. Modeling allows you not to resort to drilling when there is doubt about the presence of oil. In one such case, abandoning drilling saved the company about $ 80 million.
As for the new American supercomputer, some projects will have access to it this year to model the subatomic behavior of materials, identify factors that cause cancer, and study the interaction of proteins and cellular systems. The main customer in 2019 will be the Department of Energy, which uses it for its alternative energy computing. Summit will also be used in artificial intelligence applications in 2019.
With the help of a Russian supercomputer, the group of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University and the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences obtained results on numerical modeling of the formation and development of tip vortices in supersonic modes, seismic data were processed, for the needs of RSC Energia, calculations were made of the flow around a spacecraft when braking in the atmosphere and landing Earth. The Lomonosov also solved the problem of mass and heat transfer for a promising nuclear reactor. In April, scientists from the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University studied different types of polymerization reactions using computer simulations on the Lomonosov-2 supercomputer.
Assembly shop of RSC Energia.
In the spring of this year, it became known that Rosatom and Roscosmos are beginning to test engines for a new Russian super-heavy rocket in virtual reality as part of a supercomputer simulation. The project began back in 2014 and cost almost 270 million rubles. On January 30, 2018, an act of acceptance of works on the development of software for virtual tests was signed.
What can in the future
There are many options. Supercomputers can be used to increase the accuracy of meteorological forecasts, diagnoses, to identify the relationship between genes and cancer, to simulate turbulence, combustion processes, to develop new materials, new drugs, to simulate the operation of new technology, to calculate deformations of solids taking into account destruction processes, control over drones, simulate the use of modern weapons, to analyze data from satellites and drones, cryptography, simulate the effects of electromagnetic radiation on composite materials (in particular, on aircraft coatings), simulate brain function, and so on.
Supercomputers will also be involved in personality profiling and the implementation of face recognition systems, activity monitoring and social rating in China. According to some forecasts, supercomputers will be able to accurately simulate the entire weather system of the Earth after they achieve performance in excess of 1 zetaflops (1000 exaflops). The appearance of such machines is expected by 2030.
Tracking system in Guiyang, China.
Who has access
It is not only the performance of the best supercomputer that matters, but also the total number of machines in the country and their availability. The more data centers, the more organizations and institutions can access them, the wider range of tasks can be solved.
In Russia, the capabilities of only one supercomputer complex of Moscow University are currently used by 2,500 specialists from 20 divisions of Moscow State University, more than 100 institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and more than 100 universities in Russia.
According to the Top500 project, the country with the largest number of super-powerful computers as of June this year is China: it owns 206 supercomputers from the ranking (six months ago there were 201 systems). At the same time, the United States reduced its share in the rating from 143 systems to 124. But it can be noted that in terms of the aggregate performance of all systems in the country, the United States overtook China this time. America's total productivity is 38.2% of the Top500's total productivity, while China's is 29.1%.
The average increase in the power of supercomputers in the world.
Japan (36 systems), Great Britain (22 systems), Germany (21 systems), France (18 systems) are behind China and the United States in terms of the number of supercomputers.
Russia has four supercomputers in the ranking - one more than in the previous list six months ago. Lomonosov-2 took 72nd place, a computer in Roshydromet - 172nd, Lomonosov - 326th position, a supercomputer in the Kurchatov Institute - 458th line of the rating.
What's next?
And then the advanced countries will work to overcome the physical limitations of existing supercomputers. The companies will focus on creating technologies such as silicon photonics, neuromorphic and quantum computing, biocomputers and cellular computers. For example, in 2014, IBM launched research programs in the first areas with a volume of funding of $ 3 billion.
The acceleration of the development of new materials and technologies with the help of supercomputers in various directions may ultimately give a cumulative giant impetus to the development of countries and their technological separation from competitors. The rapid growth of computer productivity is even called a revolution in the development of civilization.
Ilya Plekhanov